Prüferinnen: Hannah Barker (Arizona State University), Claudia Jarzebowski (Universität Bonn)
Betreuerin: Juliane Schiel (Universität Wien)


Titel der Dissertation: "She wants to do it her own way." Enslaved Women, Their Work, and Their Children in the Datini Merchant Community, 1380s–1410s 

Abstract: The daily lives of enslaved women in the households of the late medieval merchant community around Francesco Datini were marked by emotional control, psychological pressure, physical violence, forced mobility, and the denial of motherhood. In their roles as household workers, sex workers, financial assets, and providers of children to Italian men, female slaves navigated the power relations in their owners’ society to improve their lives under coercive circumstances. Based on 1,200 unpublished merchant letters and 130 account ledgers from the Datini Archive in Prato, Italy, dating from the 1380s to the 1410s, this study reconstructs and tells the biographies of enslaved women who were owned for a limited time or for life by merchants or companies in the western Mediterranean, namely Prato, Florence, Pisa, Genoa, Avignon, Barcelona, Valencia, and Palma de Mallorca. Rather than attempting to reconcile the different fates of women with the same legal status, this study asks why and under what circumstances the individual lives of enslaved women in the Datini community could and did develop, and what they and non-enslaved people had to do with it.