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 enslaved women, and the fact that they 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. 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. 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. 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; and 4) how the enslavement of minority women shaped collective identities and intercommunal relations.

We will approach each one of the four strands through the following five key prisms: A) time and space, namely, local, transregional, and global developments that occurred from 1500 to 1800, their bearing on women’s enslavement, and, conversely, the extent to which dealing with female slavery in Mediterranean Catholic Europe impacted them; B) familiarity with the realities of women’s enslavement and how it prompted free women’s criticism of gender inequality, ultimately contributing to the linkage of abolitionist claims and advocacy of women’s rights and to the creation of new opportunities for women, in Mediterranean Europe and beyond; C) female enslavement and the question of free will, namely, how the ubiquity of baptized yet unfree women, who were neither wives nor nuns, complicated attitudes toward the meaning of consent when making a choice entailing both spiritual and social outcomes, such as getting married or taking monastic vows; D) the demographic consequences of the common practices of enslaving non-European women of non-Catholic origin, and how such consequences might be reconciled with the eventual disappearance of slavery from the Catholic regions of the Mediterranean; and E) tackling documentary gaps as well as archival and artistic erasures to recover the histories of enslaved women, and account for the causes underlying the varieties of invisibility of female enslavement in the historical record.

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.

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