Description
Book SynopsisPeople in the Middle Ages and the early modern age more often suffered from imprisonment and enslavement than we might have assumed. Incarceration and Slavery in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age approaches these topics from a wide variety of perspectives and demonstrates collectively the great relevance of the issues involved. Both incarceration and slavery were (and continue to be) most painful experiences, and no one was guaranteed exemption from it. High-ranking nobles and royalties were often the victims of imprisonment and, at times, had to wait many years until their ransom was paid. Similarly, slavery existed throughout Christian Europe and in the Arab world. However, while imprisonment occasionally proved to be the catalyst for major writings and creativity, slaves in the Ottoman empire and in Egypt succeeded in rising to the highest position in society (Janissaries, Mamluks, and others).
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Historical, Literary, and Philosophical Reflections on the Phenomena of Imprisonment and Slavery in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period
Albrecht Classen
Chapter 1: The Transformation of Gehenna: Taking the Biblical Wasteland into the Prison House of Hell
Warren Tormey
Chapter 2: Insprinc haptbandun, inuar uigandun: Magical (?) Remedies to Escape from Imprisonment in the Germanic Tradition
Chiara Benati
Chapter 3: Ambivalence in the Poems of the Slave-Knight ‘Antarah Ibn Shaddād: An Engagement with Historicism(s)
Doaa Omran
Chapter 4: Slavery and Anti-Slavery Discourse in the Qur’an: A New-Historicist Reading
Christiane Paulus and Magda Hasabelnaby
Chapter 5: The Tragic Incarceration and Martyrdom of Al-Hallaj: A Spiritual Passage from Suffering to Glorification
Amany El-Sawy
Chapter 6: Fruitless Wars and Abominable Crimes: Unfreedom in the Political Rule and Violence of Late Ninth-Century Southern Italy
Sarah Whitten
Chapter 7: Prisons That Never Were: Ruins, Churches, and Cruelty in Medieval and Modern Iberia (Eighth Through Nineteenth Centuries)
Abel Lorenzo-Rodríguez
Chapter 8: Tit for Tat: Imprisonment, Slavery, Torture and Other Retribution in William IX’s Gab of the Red Cat
Fidel Fajardo-Acosta
Chapter 9: Thralls in Old Icelandic Literature: Historical Trope or Literary Device?
Carlee Arnett
Chapter 10: Piracy, Imprisonment, Merchants, and Freedom: Rudolf von Ems’s The Good Gerhart (ca. 1220): Mediterranean Perspectives in a Middle High German Context; with Some Reflections on the Topic of Imprisonment in Other Medieval Narratives
Albrecht Classen
Chapter 11: Don Juan Manuel’s Long-Lost Uncle, Don Enrique: Back From Twenty-Five Years in Captivity in Italy
Maria Cecilia Ruiz
Chapter 12: Mamlūks, Qaḍis, and the Local Population: A Discourse of Resistance, Power, and Liminality in Medieval Egypt
Sally Abed
Chapter 13: The Education of Male Slaves in the Ottoman Empire and the Restructuring of Ottoman Social Hierarchy
Maha Baddar
Chapter 14: From Imprisonment to Liberation: Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale as a Multi-Layered Exploration of a Paradigm for Prison Life
Daniel F. Pigg
Chapter 15: How to Get Out of Prison: Imprisoned Jews and Their Hafturfehde: Records from the Medieval and Early Modern Holy Roman Empire (Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries)
Andreas Lehnertz and Birgit Wiedl
Chapter 16: Overcoming Stress in Imprisonment: How Positive Religious Coping and Expressive Writing Helped Fray Luis de León Survive His Inquisitorial Trial (1572‒1576)
J. Michael Fulton
Chapter 17: Health and Community Rescue or Soul Salvation? Incarceration as an Anti-Plague Measure in the Czech Lands in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Filip Hrbek
Chapter 18: Shakespeare’s Savage Slave
Thomas Willard
