Lecture | Global Histories of Knowledge Seminar
Captive Entanglements: Slavery, Medicine, and Natural Inquiry in Early Modern Italy
- Date
- Wednesday 15 January 2025
- Time
- Series
- Global Histories of Knowledge 2024 - 2025
- Location
-
Johan Huizinga
Doelensteeg 16
2311 VL Leiden - Room
- 2.60
Abstract
This paper explores the entanglement of slavery, medicine, and natural inquiry in early modern Italy, focusing on Tuscany and especially the port city of Livorno, which long operated as a center of galley slavery and was characterized by the conspicuous presence of captives from the Muslim Mediterranean world and beyond. For one thing, I consider how physicians and natural inquirers became invested in the world of galley slavery and were involved in the extraction of knowledge as well as labor from enslaved subjects. For another, I examine how captives participated in medical and natural pursuits and acted as agents of medical and natural knowledge.
Speaker
Lucia Dacome is Associate Professor and Pauline M. H. Mazumdar Chair in the History of Medicine at the IHPST, University of Toronto. Her research focuses on themes at the intersection of the social, cultural, and material history of health and medicine, histories of bodies and gender, and histories of slavery and race in early modern Italy and the Mediterranean world. She is the author of Malleable Anatomies (2017) and co-editor of Unruly Objects (2020). She is currently working on a project on slavery, medicine, and natural inquiry in early modern Italy, focusing on the Tuscan port-city of Livorno.
