This workshop explores forms of violence integral to slavery as a condition and a practice in early modern Europe. Whilst discourses on slavery and violence in the Middle Passage and on the plantation were central to seventeenth and eighteenth-century abolitionism, and have formed the basis of important scholarship on the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the conditions of slavery within Europe have received substantially less attention, as has the practice of domestic and quotidian violence.

This is workshop of two halves. In the first we will discuss a pre-circulated paper by Prof Julie Hardwick, focusing on enslaved women, domestic violence and the Catholic Church. Prof Hardwick has written extensively about violence, coverture, and communities in early modern France. Here she turns her attention to the presence of enslaved women and the quotidian violence they experienced as a religious, not simply a secular phenomenon.  

The second half of the workshop opens out to consider the methodological, ethical and historiographical considerations of accounting for such violence. As all historians of early modern Europe will know, evidence for the presence of Black and Afro-descended people in local records is often fragmentary and diffuse. This can (and has) lead to a ‘flattening’ of the conditions in which they lived and in particular of the violence endured by individuals and wrought by domestic enslavers. We invite all participants to contribute source material in which domestic, intimate, or embodied violence is rendered visible. We will collectively consider how to study and write about this, how to incorporate it into our narratives and understanding of early modern Europe, and how best to make such work ‘accountable’ to the enslaved subjects at its heart.

Due to the nature of this work in progress, attendance is strictly limited. We invite interested participants to contact us ahead of time at mmor@kcl.ac.uk