The lecture will be delivered by Daniel Lord Smail, who is Professor of History at Harvard University where he works on deep human history and the history and anthropology of Mediterranean societies between 1100 and 1600.
One of the distinctive features of Mediterranean slavery is that a considerable proportion of enslaved people were manumitted after a decade or two of servitude. Scholarship, to date, has emphasized the formal legal mechanisms that enabled the passage from slavery to freedom, including acts of manumission and freedom lawsuits. In this talk Professor Smail will argue that a successful passage, for those who sought it, also depended on informal processes that are much less visible in the record but no less important, notably acculturation and embodiment.
Free event
