ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Managing Bodies at Sea: Medical Knowledge and Galley Labour in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

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

English Abstract

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a growing body of manuals and ordinances on maritime galley labour emerged, detailing the recruitment, management and disciplining of rowers and ship personnel. The French Stolonomie (mid-sixteenth century), composed for King Henry II, systematically lays out work regimes, dietary provisions, sleeping arrangements and punitive measures for free, indentured and convicted galley rowers in the royal fleet. It contains advice about how the barbers and surgeons maintain the rowers’ health and provide cheap labour. Bartolomeo Crescentio’s Nautica Mediterranea (1601) explains how to evaluate and manage the 180–240 rowers – enslaved men, debtors and convicts –who powered the papal galleys. Addressed to Cardinal Aldobrandino and dedicated to Nicolò Ghiberto de Lorena, chief physician of the fleet, it explicitly ties medical expertise to galley governance and discusses the physiognomy of rowers and their nativity using environmental medicine. These manuals reveal how disciplinary regimes and embodied assessments of galley rowers relied on medicine to organize (forced) labour. My presentation asks two questions: first, how did surgeons and physicians use various strains of medical knowledge to advise on the recruitment and management of galley rowers? And, secondly, how was the codification of this knowledge adapted to different labour pools? Addressing these questions clarifies the intersection of maritime governance, medicine and emerging notions of race in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Author

• Claire Stichting Weeda, Leiden University