Female Slavery in Mediterranean Catholic Europe, 1500-1800

Introduction

More than one million, and perhaps as many as two million individuals were enslaved in the Catholic regions of the early modern Mediterranean. Despite evidence of the prevalence of female slavery and of the fact that women constituted the bulk of the enslaved population in some areas, scholarship on bondage in Mediterranean Europe from 1500 to 1800 retains a strong androcentric bias.

Project Overview

Transcending national historiographic traditions, FemSMed will break new ground by providing, for the first time, a comprehensive investigation of women’s enslavement and its wide-ranging implications during the pivotal period in European history that encompassed the Renaissance, the Reformations, the onset of European colonialism, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment.

Research Goals

Whereas extant scholarship emphasizes religious, political, and economic aspects, FemSMed’s goal is to uncover the sexual, familial, and broader social contexts of these aspects. By elucidating the long-term consequences of women’s enslavement, it further aims to reveal the gendered mechanisms of racialization and ethnicization, and raise awareness of Europe’s multiethnic and multireligious heritage.

Key Areas of Exploration

This will be done by exploring:

1. Typologies of slave women’s abuse and their implications for perceptions of illicit sexuality and gender-based violence.
2. How the birth of children under slavery bore on the creation of categories of difference.
3. The impact of domestic female slavery on slaveholders’ family life and on conceptualizations of consanguineal and affinal kinship.
4. How the enslavement of minority women shaped collective identities and intercommunal relations.

Methodology

Informed by theoretical advances in the sociological and anthropological study of slavery, FemSMed employs methodologies from social and religious history as well as from art history and the study of material culture, combining a transcultural approach with a gender analysis of a vast array of archival, printed, visual, and material sources.