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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2021
There is little modern scholarship specifically on child slavery in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. The collection by Campbell, Gwyn, Miers, Suzanne, and Miller, Joseph C. (eds.), Children in Slavery through the Ages (Athens, OH, 2009) includes only one chapter on child slaves for the period and regions studied here, and it actually focuses on the adult lives of these “slave girls.” Harper’s, Kyle Slavery in the Late Roman World AD 275–425 (Cambridge, 2011) has a valuable chapter on Constantine’s legislation on exposure and sale of newborn children. A more long-range approach to the same topic is Boswell’s, John The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (Chicago, IL, 1998). He argues for the survival of many abandoned newborns and their rescue by “the kindness of strangers,” although he is much too optimistic about their ultimate fate and misinterprets some of the legal evidence. Boswell’s argument that medieval oblation was essentially a continuation of ancient infant abandonment has been refuted, but his book is still the most extended treatment of child slavery in medieval Europe.
Recent work on slavery in the Middle Ages, while not focusing on child enslavement, offers much of importance and relevance. Michael McCormick’s groundbreaking Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce AD 300–900 (Cambridge, 2001) draws on many individual narratives of enslavement, among them those enslaved as children like St. Elias the Younger (especially pp. 244–267 and 733–777). However, McCormick’s thesis that the early medieval slave trade spurred development of the Carolingian economy has been challenged (see Rio, Slavery After Rome and Chapter 18 in this volume), and he focuses on the trans-Mediterranean slave trade between Europe and North Africa at the expense of other important trade networks (see Chapter 14 in this volume). Alice Rio’s recent book, Slavery After Rome, 500–1100 (Oxford, 2017) offers a bold new perspective on what unfree status meant in the early Middle Ages, with attention to the differing trajectories of slavery in Francia, England, Italy, and the Byzantine Empire. She takes an essentially transactional view of freedom in this period (see also Chapter 18 in this volume), where the weak use their status as a tool for negotiating with the more powerful and sell or give themselves to the more powerful in return for sustenance. Children may figure in these negotiations but as objects with which to negotiate rather than agents. Wyatt’s, David Slaves and Warriors in Medieval Britain and Ireland, 800–1200 (Leiden, 2009) stresses the vulnerability of children as well as women in societies of the early medieval British Isles, where raiding and the sexual exploitation of enslaved captives were important elements of male hierarchy and honor.
Iris Origo’s 1955 article “The Domestic Enemy: Eastern Slaves in Tuscany in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” Speculum, 39: 321–366 remains essential for understanding the resurgence of domestic slavery in Italian cities in the late Middle Ages. She marshaled extensive archival, literary, and even visual evidence for the presence of many domestic slaves in Florence, who were primarily women and children. Origo also has a brief discussion of the so-called animae (souls), children from the Adriatic region who were not legally slaves but were consigned to service in Italian households. For Spain, Blumenthal’s, Debra Enemies and Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth-Century Valencia (Ithaca, NY, 2008) studies master–slave relations in late medieval Valencia, including disputes over the paternity of slavewomen’s children and claims for freedom by the mothers. Many of the chapters in Reuven Amitai and Christoph Cluse’s recent collection, Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Eastern Mediterranean (c. 1000–1500) (Turnhout, 2017), mention the traffic in children and teenagers.
The scholarship on female sexual slavery in the dar al-islam has focused primarily on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Female sexual slavery in the medieval period has received less attention. Pierce, Leslie, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York, 1993), a groundbreaking study of slavery and Ottoman politics of reproduction, covers the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries. Ali, Kecia, Marriage and Slavery in Early Islamic law (Cambridge, MA, 2010), continues the seminal work of Johansen, Baber, “The Valorization of the Human Body in Sunnī Islamic Law,” Princeton Papers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 4 (1996): 71–112. On female sexual slavery in Maliki law, in the context of North Africa and Iberia, see the publications of de la Puente, Cristina, including “Límites legales del concubinato: normas y tabués en la esclavitud sexual según la Bidāya de Ibn Rušd,” La Qantara, 28 (2007): 409–433. The essays in Gordon, Matthew and Hain, Katherine (eds.), Concubines and Courtesans: Women and Slavery in Islamic History (New York, 2017) provide an excellent overview of more recent scholarship. Elizabeth Urban, Conquered Populations in Early Islam: Non-Arabs, Slaves, and the Sons of Slave Mothers (Edinburgh, 2020) is a valuable contribution to the study of enslaved and freed women in early Islamic societies.
For responses to Kyle Harper, see Glancy, Jennifer, “The Sexual Use of Slaves: A Response to Kyle Harper on Jewish and Christian Porneia,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 134 (2015): 215–229 and Burrus, Virginia, “From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity by Kyle Harper (review),” Journal of Late Antiquity, 7 (2014): 180–182. See also Glancy, Jennifer, Slavery in Early Christianity (New York, 2006).
The only serious study of female sexual slavery in the Jewish communities of Medieval Egypt is Craig Perry’s dissertation, based on Geniza documents, “The Daily Life of Slaves and the Global Reach of Slavery in Medieval Egypt, 969–1250” (Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 2014). Perry also discusses the presence of muwallad/a slaves in Jewish households.
In the late medieval kingdom of Valencia, the child did not necessarily follow the status of the mother. The thirteenth-century legal code, the Furs de Válencia, mandated that a master who impregnated his female slave free the slave and her child and baptize the child. This provision, however, was not an endorsement of social reproduction by female slaves but an enforcement of Christian sexual morality. The burden of proof was on the female slave. See Blumenthal, Debra, Enemies and Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth-Century Valencia (Ithaca, NY, 2009). Scholars of Renaissance Italy have shown that in the late fourteenth century, in the Italian city-states of Venice, Florence, and Genoa and their colonies, a man’s children by his female slave were assumed to be free. The enslaved mother, however, did not gain her freedom. For an overview, see McKee, Sally, “Inherited Status and Slavery in Late Medieval Italy and Venetian Crete,” Past & Present, 182 (2004): 31–53. This approach did not reflect a shift in mainstream patterns of social reproduction. In Christian Europe, in the Caribbean, and in the Americas, the recognition of the children of female sexual slaves by their male owners was always a local phenomenon, an exception that did not have a long-term effect on the practice of sexual slavery.
No modern historical work directly addresses medieval attitudes toward blackness, so we must glean from a wide variety of studies mentioned in the notes concerning slavery and racism. William Chester Jordan comes closest in his fundamental essays on race, blackness, and opinions about Jews: “The Medieval Background,” in Salzman, Jack and West, Cornel (eds.), Struggles in the Promised Land: Toward a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States (Oxford, 1997), pp. 53–64, and “Why ‘Race’?,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 31 (2001): 165–173. Since skin color figures prominently, it is not surprising that art historians come closest to forthrightly addressing the subject. In particular, the older work of Jean Devisse and Michel Mollat, recently reconsidered by Kaplan, Paul H. D. in Bindman, David and Louis Gates, Henry Jr. (eds.), The Image of the Black in Western Art, Vol. 2, pt. 1 (Cambridge, MA, 2010) takes up the images of blacks and hence blackness. See also Robertson, Charles, “Allegory and Ambiguity in Michelangelo’s Slaves,” in the useful collection McGrath, Elizabeth and Massing, Jean Michel (eds.), The Slave in European Art: From Renaissance Trophy to Abolitionist Emblem (London, 2012), pp. 39–61 and plates. Hondius, Dienke, Blackness in Western Europe: Racial Patterns of Paternalism and Exclusion (Abingdon, 2017) explores these issues for the early modern and modern periods.
Scholars working on the late ancient world have vigorously debated the origins of racism and color prejudice. The standard book by Snowden, Frank, Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks (Cambridge, MA, 1983) remains the point of departure, disputed in part by Isaac, Benjamin, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton, NJ, 2004) and Goldenberg, David M., The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Princeton, NJ, 2003), and with subsequent refinements in McCoskey, Denise Eileen, Race: Antiquity and its Legacy (Oxford, 2012). For the Middle Ages, the essays in Eliav-Feldon, Miriam, Isaac, Benjamin, and Ziegler, Joseph, The Origins of Racism in the West (Cambridge, 2009) address the origins of racism in the West in the Middle Ages from a variety of perspectives, some concerning blackness, physiognomy, and protoracism. See also Ramey, Lynn Tarte, Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages (Gainesville, FL, 2014). All recent works base their analyses on the fundamental insights of Frederickson, George M., Racism: A Short History (Princeton, NJ, 2002).
Contemporary literary works by Mandeville, John, The Book of Marvels and Travels, trans. Anthony Bale (Oxford, 2012) and von Eschenbach, Wolfram, Parzival and Titurel, trans. Cyril Edwards (Oxford, 2009) also illuminate some medieval attitudes toward blackness and mixing of colors. Blackface, clowns, and Hellequin, and other topics, remain to be studied.
For the end of this period, good work is being done on late medieval and early modern attitudes toward blackness and their connections to Africans and slavery. Lowe’s, Kate introduction to the collection of essays in Thomas Earle and Kate Lowe (eds.), Black Africans in Renaissance Europe (Cambridge, 2005) lays out the basic issues, and Blumenthal, Debra, Enemies and Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth-Century Valencia (Ithaca, NY, 2009) considers them for Iberia.
This chapter focuses both on how enslaved people asserted agency in the Middle Ages (largely in Islamic contexts) and on how historians have conceptualized and critiqued agency as a category of analysis. As the chapters in this volume illustrate, scholars are still heavily involved in doing the spadework necessary to make enslaved people more visible as historical actors. For the medieval Middle East, see Elizabeth Urban, Conquered Populations in Early Islam: Non-Arabs, Slaves, and the Sons of Slave Mothers (Edinburgh, 2020). See also Matthew S. Gordon and Kathryn A. Hain (eds.), Concubines and Courtesans: Women and Slavery in Islamic History (Oxford, 2017) which contains several chapters by the editors and other contributors that study the agency and social mobility of enslaved women. Along with this valuable collection, there is Gordon, Matthew S., “The Place of Competition: The Careers of ʿArib Al-Mamuniya and ʿUlayya Bint Al-Mahdi, Sisters in Song,” in ʿAbbasid Studies: Occasional Papers of the School of ʿAbbasid Studies, Cambridge, 6–10 July 2002 (Leuven, 2004), pp. 61–81, and Gordon, , “ʿArib Al-Mamuniya: A Third/Ninth Century ʿAbbasid Courtesan,” in Yavari, Neguin, Potter, Lawrence G., and Oppenheim, Jean-Marc Ran (eds.), Views from the Edge: Essays in Honor of Richard W. Bulliet (New York, 2004), pp. 86–100; Bray, Julia, “Men, Women and Slaves in Abbasid Society,” in Brubaker, Leslie and Smith, Julia M. H. (eds.), Gender in the Early Medieval World, East and West, 300–900 (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 121–146; and Caswell, Fuad Matthew, The Slave Girls of Baghdad: The Qiyan in the Early Abbasid Era (London, 2011). On the Zanj revolt in Iraq, see Campbell, Gwyn, “East Africa in the Early Indian Ocean World Slave Trade: The Zanj Revolt Reconsidered,” in Campbell, Gwyn (ed.), Early Exchange between Africa and the Wider Indian Ocean World (Cham, 2016), pp. 275–303.
For the Islamic West, see Ruggles, D. Fairchild, “Mothers of a Hybrid Dynasty: Race, Genealogy, and Acculturation in al-Andalus,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 34 (2004): 65–94; works by de la Puente, Christina, including “Slaves in al-Andalus through Maliki Wathaiq Works (4th–6th Centuries H/10th–12th Centuries CE): Marriage and Slavery as Factors of Social Categorisation,” Annales islamologiques, 42 (2008): 187–212; and works by Fiero, Maribel, including “Violence Against Women in Andalusi Historical Sources (Third/Ninth–Seventh/Thirteenth Centuries),” in Gleave, Robert and Kristó-Nagy, Istvánt T (eds.), Violence in Islamic Thought from the Quran to the Mongols (Edinburgh, 2015), pp. 155–174.
For a later period (primarily in Egypt), see numerous works by Shelomo D. Goitein and Mordechai A. Friedman. A bibliography of the relevant works and further analysis is in my own, “The Daily Life of Slaves and the Global Reach of Slavery, 969–1250 CE” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 2014). See also Marmon, Shaun, “Black Slaves in Mamluk Narratives: Representations of Transgression,” Al-Qantara: Revista de Estudios Árabes, 28 (2007): 435–464; Rapoport, Yossef, “Women and Gender in Mamluk Society: An Overview,” Mamluk Studies Review, 11 (2007): 1–45; Petry, Carl F., The Criminal Underworld in a Medieval Islamic Society (Chicago, IL, 2012); and Perry, Craig, “Conversion as an Aspect of Master–Slave Relationships in the Medieval Jewish Community,” in Fox, Yaniv and Yisraeli, Yosi (eds.), Contesting Inter-Religious Conversion in the Medieval World (London, 2016), pp. 135–159.
Though this chapter focuses on the Arabo-Islamic world, scholarship on agency in other historical contexts is indispensable. For antiquity, see the chapters on resistance by Keith Bradley and Niall McKeown, and the chapter by Joshel, Sandra, in Bradley, Keith R. and Cartledge, Paul (eds.), The Cambridge World History of Slavery, Vol. 1: The Ancient Mediterranean World (Cambridge, 2011). For medieval Europe, see works by McKee, Sally, especially, “Slavery,” in Bennett, Judith M. and Karras, Ruth Mazo (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe (Oxford, 2013), pp. 281–294, as well as Blumenthal, Debra, Enemies and Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth-Century Valencia (Ithaca, NY, 2009), and Hanß, Stefan and Schiel, Juliane, introduction to Mediterranean Slavery Revisited (500–1800)/Neue Perspektiven Auf Mediterrane Sklaverei (500–1800) ed. Hanß, and Schiel, (Zurich, 2014), pp. 11–24. See also chapters in the latter volume by Blumenthal, McKee, and Schiel. For teaching and research, see also the resources under the theme “Agency” in the new website created by Hannah Barker: http://www.medievalslavery.org. Accessed January 8, 2021.
Scholarship on agency and resistance proliferates for the early modern and modern period. See the chapters on resistance by Turner, Mary and by Florentino, Manolo and Amantino, Márcia in Eltis, David and Engerman, Stanley (eds.), The Cambridge World History of Slavery, Vol. 3: 1420–1804 (Cambridge, 2011) and by Pacquette, Robert L. in Eltis, David, Engerman, Stanley, Drescher, Seymour, and Richardson, David (eds.), The Cambridge World History of Slavery, Vol. 4: 1804–2016 (Cambridge, 2017). Two additional and essential works are Johnson, Walter, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History, 37 (2003): 113–124 and Thomas, Lynn M., “Historicising Agency,” Gender & History, 28 (2016): 324–339. In light of the ongoing impact of digital tools and corpora on scholarship, see Johnson, Jessica Marie, “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads,” Social Text, 36 (2018): 57–79. Finally, animal studies scholars have also developed critiques of agency that are useful for historians. For examples, see Despret, Vinciane, “From Secret Agents to Interagency,” History and Theory, 52 (2013): 29–44 and Rees, Amanda, “Animal Agents? Historiography, Theory, and History of Science in the Anthropocene,” BJHS Themes, 2 (2017): 1–10 (doi: 10.1017/bjt.2017.11).
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