ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Bodies in Bondage: Medical Knowledge, Regimes of Health, and Resistance in the Early Modern Mediterranean

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

The entanglement of medicine and slavery lies at the heart of some of the most innovative and unsettling research on the Atlantic world. In the Mediterranean context, however—despite new estimates suggesting that between five and nine million individuals were captured and trafficked across its waters between 1500 and 1800—this connection has remained largely unexplored. This absence is all the more striking given that the early modern Mediterranean was a crucible of conflict, negotiation, and exchange, in which health and captivity intersected in ways that profoundly shaped the societies along all its shores. Existing scholarship has illuminated the legal, financial, and religious dimensions of captivity and corsair warfare, while historians of medicine and science have begun to trace the circulation of remedies, practices, and medical knowledge throughout the region. Yet these strands of research have remained curiously separate. As a result, we still lack a comprehensive investigation of how health was implicated in systems of captivity—of how the bodies of captives became sites where labor was regulated, diplomacy conducted, knowledge transmitted, and cultural differences forged. This session addresses this important, if neglected and under-researched, chapter of medical history. Engaging in the study of the interwoven histories of medicine and slavery along Mediterranean shores, it casts new light on the meaning and understanding of bodies, health, and medicine in the premodern world.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Hannah Murphy, King's College London

Commentator

• Hannah Murphy, King's College London

Individual Presentations

• Managing Bodies at Sea: Medical Knowledge and Galley Labour in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries - Claire Stichting Weeda, Leiden University

• ‘One of the Miraculous Medicaments’: Opium, Slavery and Health in Early Modern Italy - Lucia Dacome, University of Toronto

• Surviving the Galleys of Venice: Self-healing, Magic and Spaces of Agency at Sea - Valentina Pugliano, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Session Organizers

• Lucia Dacome, University of Toronto

• Valentina Pugliano, Massachusetts Institute of Technology