Speaking of Slavery
Color, Ethnicity, and Human Bondage in Italy
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 19907559 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Steven A Epstein (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Pages | 240 |
| Publication date | 2018-12-31 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | BOOK |
| Venue | Speaking of Slavery (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Cornell University Press (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.7591/9781501725135 |
| OpenAlex | W2169574095 |
| Open Library | OL31942723M |
| ISBN | 9781501725135 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 31 |
In this highly original work, Steven A. Epstein shows that the ways Italians employ words and think about race and labor are profoundly affected by the language used in medieval Italy to sustain a system of slavery. The author's findings about the surprising persistence of the "language of slavery" demonstrate the difficulty of escaping the legacy of a shameful past.For Epstein, language is crucial to understanding slavery, for it preserves the hidden conditions of that institution. He begins his book by discussing the words used to conduct and describe slavery in Italy, from pertinent definitions given in early dictionaries, to the naming of slaves by their masters, to the ways in which bondage has been depicted by Italian writers from Dante to Primo Levi and Antonio Gramsci. Epstein then probes Italian legal history, tracing the evolution of contracts for buying, selling, renting, and freeing people. Next he considers the behaviors of slaves and slave owners as a means of exploring how concepts of liberty and morality changed over time. He concludes by analyzing the language of the market, where medieval Italians used words to fix the prices of people they bought and sold.The first history of slavery in Italy ever published, Epstein's work has important implications for other societies, particularly America's. "For too long," Epstein notes, "Americans have studied their own slavery as it if were the only one ever to have existed, as if it were the archetype of all others." His book allows citizens of the United States and other former slave-holding nations a richer understanding of their past and present
Archetype · Art · Institution · Literature · Morality · Political science · Race (biology) · Renting · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Political Economy and Marxism · Ethnicity · Italy · Slavery
Africans to Spanish America
The “dark Welsh”
Capital Punishment as a Problem for the Philosophy of Law
Whose City Is This? Hucksters, Domestic Servants, Wet‐Nurses, Prostitutes, and Slaves in Late Medieval Western Mediterranean Urban Society
Re‐Forging the ‘Age of Iron’ Part I
Negotiating Slavery in a Tolerant Frontier
The 2001 Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture
Visible Lives
Race, empire, and early music
Antiquities
Artists’ workshops
Mapping and voyages
Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism
African Diasporas and Postcolonial Africa
The Medieval Discovery of Nature
Religion
The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Renaissance
The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages II
Early Globalities, and Its Questions, Objectives, and Methods
Slavery and the Law
Enslaved rebels, fugitives, and litigants
Judges, Masters, Diviners
Sociology’s Imperial Unconscious
Japanese Colonial Structure in Korea in Comparative Perspective
German Sociology and Empire
We Cherished the Same Hostility to Every Form of Tyranny”
A touch of class
Migrations forcées des africains subsahariens
What Did Medieval Slavery Look Like? Color, Race, and Unfreedom in Later Medieval Iberia
Long-range continuities in comparative and historical sociology
La question raciale et le 'sol libre de France
| Unique citing works | 31 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,29 |
| Citation span | 2002 - 2022 (21) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 23 |