Speaking of Slavery

Each chapter sets up a dialogue between medieval language about slavery and language in more recent times—for example, in the Risorgimento, the anti-slavery movement in Italy, colonial experience, and fascism. Epstein concedes that the Italian contribution to slavery has been insignificant in global terms but that Italy's medieval experience with slavery has colored modern language about color and ethnicity.... The third substantive chapter deals with day-to-day life for slaves: the work that was expected of them, the treatment of slave pregnancy, cultural resistance from slaves, and other related issues. Epstein combs through notarial charters in search of language that is 'personal' rather than formulaic in order to humanize this picture of domestic slaves' daily life. This chapter and the following one on the Great Economy explore the heritage of medieval slavery for the plantation system in the New World, which will be of interest to those who study slave systems in the modern world. Throughout his study, Epstein pays attention to the practice of slavery on the islands of the Mediterranean and in overseas colonies of Italian city-states.... This monograph presents a case for a historical memory of slavery that colors modern discourse in Italy and carries important implications for perceptions of race and ethnicity.

~Susan Mosher Stuard, Haverford College, Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Scholars with specialisms outside Italy will find a great deal of interest in this book and many intriguing parallels with systems of slavery elsewhere.... Epstein's persuasive notion of the corrupting and normalizing language of medieval slavery will effect a permanent change in the way in which Italian slavery will be approached in the future. His pioneering, well written and constructed study is very timely, and it is to be hope that it will provide a lead for other much needed investigations of the culture of Italian slavery, both historical and interdisciplinary.

~Kate Lowe, Slavery and Abolition

Speaking of Slavery argues that Italian words specifically, and Italy's spoken culture generally, supported the owning and exploiting of humans, thus mainstreaming ideas about cultural superiority and inferiority that are still evident in Italian nomenclature today.... Epstein's study is successful on two fronts. First, he successfully challenges the alienation of discussions of New World slavery to the American context; moreover, he demonstrates that the attitudes of explorers like Christopher Columbus cannot be separated from preexisting slave traditions and language traditions. While the international slave market lost its stronghold long ago, the language established to support it still shapes ideas about race. In the end, the relationship between early Italian slavery and Italian ideas about ethnicity is still evident in the language used to talk about color and race, specifically the language reserved for immigrant laborers and ethnic minorities living in Italy today.

~Audrey Kerr, Southern Connecticut University, Sixteenth Century Journal

Steven Epstein's study of slavery in medieval Italy focuses on language, the ways people talked or wrote about slaves in a variety of contexts and the ways slaves talked about themselves. He makes it clear that slavery's significance in Italian history is more cultural than economic; although he does discuss the kinds of work that slaves did, he is more concerned with the intellectual and social implications of markets than with quantifying the contributions of slaves to production.... In the later Middle Ages women slaves outnumbered men slaves, while among free servants men were the minority. Epstein implies that the feminization of (free) domestic service in sixteenth-century Venice may be a result of the decline of slavery and the replacement of female domestic slaves by free female servants.... A final contribution of Epstein's work is to set slavery in the context of servanthood and poverty. Servants and poor laborers were not legally property, but their lives might be in effect quite similar to those of slaves, and the kind of language used about them could be similar as well.

~Ruth Mazo Karras, University of Minnesota, Speculum

The heart of the book examines the language used in many kinds of medieval documents dealing with slavery... Many interesting individual stories and insights....

~Choice