Incarceration and Slavery in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age

A Cultural-Historical Investigation of the Dark Side in the Pre-Modern World

Albrecht Classen

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781978795266
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

People 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 contents

• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Transformation of Gehenna: Taking the Biblical Wasteland into the Prison House of Hell
• Chapter 2: Insprinc haptbandun, inuar uigandun: Magical (?) Remedies to Escape from Imprisonment in the Germanic Tradition ⤀
• Chapter 3: Ambivalence in the Poems of the Slave-Knight ‘Antarah Ibn Shaddād: An Engagement with Historicism(s)
• Chapter 4: Slavery and Anti-Slavery Discourse in the Qur’an: A New-Historicist Reading
• Chapter 5: The Tragic Incarceration and Martyrdom of Al-Hallaj: A Spiritual Passage from Suffering to Glorification
• Chapter 6: Fruitless Wars and Abominable Crimes: Unfreedom in the Political Rule and Violence of Late Ninth-Century Southern Italy
• Chapter 7: Prisons That Never Were: Ruins, Churches, and Cruelty in Medieval and Modern Iberia (Eighth through Nineteenth Centuries)
• Chapter 8: Tit for Tat: Imprisonment, Slavery, Torture, and Other Retribution in William IX’s Gab of the Red Cat
• Chapter 9: Thralls in Old Icelandic Literature: Historical Trope or Literary Device?
• Chapter 10: Piracy, Imprisonment, Merchants, and Freedom: Rudolf von Ems’s The Good Gêrhart (ca. 1220): Mediterranean Perspectives in a Middle High German Context; with Some Reflections on the Topic of Imprisonment in Other Medieval Narratives
• Chapter 11: Don Juan Manuel’s Long-Lost Uncle, Don Enrique: Back from Twenty-Five Years in Prison in Italy
• Chapter 12: Mamlūks, Qāḍis, and the Local Population: A Discourse of Resistance, Power, and Liminality in Medieval Egypt
• Chapter 13: The Education of Male Slaves in the Ottoman Empire and the Restructuring of Ottoman Social Hierarchy
• Chapter 14: From Imprisonment to Liberation: Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale as a Multilayered Exploration of a Paradigm for Prison Life
• Chapter 15: How to Get Out of Prison: Imprisoned Jews and Their Hafturfehden from the Medieval and Early Modern Holy Roman Empire (Fourteenth through Sixteenth Centuries)
• Chapter 16: Overcoming Stress in Imprisonment: How Positive Religious Coping and Expressive Writing Helped Fray Luis de León Survive His Inquisitorial Trial (1572–1576)
• Chapter 17: Health and Community Rescue or Soul Salvation? : Incarceration as an Anti-Plague Measure in the Czech Lands in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries1
• Chapter 18: Shakespeare’s Savage Slave
• Index