A neverending stream : human trafficking in Medieval Europe

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Christopher Paolella

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] This study focuses on human trafficking patterns from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Era. I argue that while slavery, as a means of compelling agricultural labor, disappeared across much of Western Europe by the middle of the twelfth century, the commercial sex industry grew. As slavery died out, the slave trade withered across Western Europe and gradually reoriented itself around the Mediterranean basin. Yet, human trafficking networks remained in Western Europe, if in attenuated form. They continued to supply a smaller, but no less persistent, labor demand that was now fueled by brothels and prostitution rings instead of agriculture. I argue further that the experiences of women link the sex trade and the slave trade, and that twelfth-century socio-economic development linked the earlier long-distance slave trade and the local and regional trafficking networks of the later Middle Ages.

Author(s):  
Carolyn Muessig

Francis of Assisi’s reported reception of the stigmata on Mount La Verna in 1224 is often considered to be the first account of an individual receiving the five wounds of Christ. The thirteenth-century appearance of this miracle, however, is not as unexpected as it first seems. Interpretations of Galatians 6:17—I bear the stigmata of the Lord Jesus Christ in my body—had been circulating in biblical commentaries since late antiquity. These works explained stigmata as wounds that martyrs received, like the apostle Paul, in their attempt to spread Christianity in the face of resistance. By the seventh century, stigmata were described as marks of Christ that priests received invisibly at their ordination. In the eleventh century, monks and nuns were perceived as bearing the stigmata in so far as they lived a life of renunciation out of love for Christ. By the later Middle Ages holy women like Catherine of Siena (d. 1380) were more frequently described as having stigmata than their male counterparts. With the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century, the way stigmata were defined reflected the diverse perceptions of Christianity held by Catholics and Protestants. This study traces the birth and evolution of religious stigmata as expressed in theological discussions and devotional practices in Western Europe from the early Middle Ages to the early seventeenth century. It also contains an introductory overview of the historiography of religious stigmata beginning in the second half of the seventeenth century to its treatment and assessment in the twenty-first century.


Author(s):  
Ildar Garipzanov

The concluding chapter highlights how the cultural history of graphic signs of authority in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages encapsulated the profound transformation of political culture in the Mediterranean and Europe from approximately the fourth to ninth centuries. It also reflects on the transcendent sources of authority in these historical periods, and the role of graphic signs in highlighting this connection. Finally, it warns that, despite the apparent dominant role of the sign of the cross and cruciform graphic devices in providing access to transcendent protection and support in ninth-century Western Europe, some people could still employ alternative graphic signs deriving from older occult traditions in their recourse to transcendent powers.


Author(s):  
Teofilo F. Ruiz

This chapter examines tournaments. The origins of tournaments in Western Europe can be traced back to classical sources and to a sparse number of references to events that looked like tournaments in the Central Middle Ages. While these early mentions provide interesting glimpses of the genealogy of fictitious combat, it was the twelfth century that truly saw the formal beginnings of these traditions of artificial warfare that would hold such a powerful grip on the European imagination for many centuries to come. Closely tied to courtly culture and in a symbiotic relationship with the great outburst of courtly literature that took place in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the tournament sank deep roots in England, France, the Low Countries, and parts of Germany during the twelfth century, and then developed elaborate rules of engagement and pageantry in succeeding centuries.


PMLA ◽  
1901 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 375-387
Author(s):  
F. M. Warren

The French poems Troie, Thèbes, and Énéas, contemporaneous with one another in the sixth and seventh decades of the twelfth century, have many characteristics in common. They each repeat in a modernized form, and with incidents and details suited to their own age, the story of one of the great epics of classical antiquity, the Iliad, the Thebaid, and the Aeneid. They also combine with this traditional outline of adventure and conquest the narrative of romantic love and courtship, as conceived by Western Europe in the Middle Ages. And finally they each and all show an effort to attain some degree of excellence in style and composition. Thus they form a class by themselves, animated, as they are, by the same spirit and having the same purpose in view, and are the first exponents in the modern tongues of the ideals of chivalry. The sources of these poems, therefore, are an object of unusual interest to the student of mediaeval literature.


Author(s):  
Andrea M. Bertone

This chapter examines how the international community has defined and framed the issue of human trafficking over the last century, and how governments such as the United States have responded politically to the problem of human trafficking. Contemporary concerns about trafficking can be traced back to a late nineteenth-century movement in the United States and Western Europe against white slavery. White slavery, also known as the white slave trade, refers to the kidnapping and transport of Caucasian girls and women for the purposes of prostitution. The chapter first considers the definitions of human trafficking before discussing the anti-white slavery movement and the increase in international consciousness about the trafficking of women. It then traces the origins of the contemporary anti-human trafficking movement and analyses how trafficking emerged as a global issue in the 1990s. It also presents a case study on human trafficking in the United States.


Author(s):  
Peregrine Horden

How should a medieval monk behave when sick? Must submission to divine test or judgement be the only response, or is resort to secular as well as spiritual medicine allowed? What is the role of the infirmary in a monastery and, for the individual monk, what are the benefits and disadvantages of staying in it? The chapter traces medieval answers to such questions through case studies drawn from the earliest phase of monasticism in late antiquity, from Carolingian Europe, from the twelfth century, and from the later Middle Ages, concluding with an outline of a set of topics for further research.


Author(s):  
А.V. Serebrennikova ◽  
◽  
А.V. Staroverov ◽  

Human trafficking as a social phenomenon originated in the period of antiquity, the greatest spread reached in the early middle ages. Until the mid-19th century in many countries of the world, and in some countries until the mid-20th century, it was carried out quite legally. Modern trafficking in human beings, committed in the form of the purchase and sale of a person, his recruitment, transportation and concealment, is a criminal act, so it is carried out in disguise or completely hidden. Modern human trafficking dates back to ancient forms of the slave trade, which allows it to be defined as a modern form of slavery. Since the object of trafficking is currently a free person, it would be wrong to replace the terms trafficking in persons with slave trade, despite the fact that they are used as equivalent in international legal instruments.


Vivarium ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Gersh

Abstract This essay attempts to provide more evidence for the notions that there actually is a Latin (as opposed to a Greek) Neoplatonic tradition in late antiquity, that this tradition includes a systematic theory of first principles, and that this tradition and theory are influential in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. The method of the essay is intended to be novel in that, instead of examining authors or works in a chronological sequence and attempting to isolate doctrines in the traditional manner, it proceeds by identifying certain philosophemes (a concept borrowed from structuralist and post-structuralist thought and here signifying certain minimal units from which philosophical “systems” can be constructed), and then studying the combination and re-combination of these philosophemes consciously and unconsciously by a selection of important medieval writers. These philosophemes occur in Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram; Augustine, De Trinitate; Augustine, De Vera Religione; Augustine, De Musica; Macrobius, Commentarius in Somnium Scipionis; and Boethius, De Consolatione Philosophiae. The sampling of medieval authors who use these philosophemes includes Eriugena, William of Conches, Thierry of Chartres, and Nicholas of Cusa.


2003 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 347-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Reynolds

The object of this article is to draw attention to an area of European legal history that I think deserves more investigation. It is the change in legal practice caused by the transition from the diffused, undifferentiated, customary law of the earlier middle ages to the various forms of expert, esoteric, professional law that dominated the higher courts of the later middle ages. The suggestion that this has not been much studied may seem odd but, though much has been written on the new study of Roman law, those who work on it have tended to concentrate on the intellectual achievements of the glossators and post-glossators, rather than on practice. Practice in canon law has received more attention, notably from legal historians trained in the Anglo-American tradition, but this has not focused closely on twelfth-century origins. The beginnings of English common law have also been much studied and, since it started off as largely a matter of procedures, that has indeed meant looking at practice. The traditional teleology of legal history has, however, prevented much cross-fertilization with the history of other legal systems. One example of the consequent detachment of English legal history is the assumption of some English legal historians that Roman law procedures were followed in what they often characterize simply as “the Continent” more generally and earlier than seems to have been the case in most areas north of the Alps. Both in England and elsewhere many legal historians concentrate on the period from the thirteenth century on, when sources become more plentiful. Meanwhile, social historians of early medieval western Europe, including England, have argued—to my mind successfully, though I am hardly unprejudiced—that early medieval law was not just a weak, ritualized, and irrational response to feuds and violence, but their investigations tend to stop before the professionals took over. The result is that, apart from recent pioneering work on twelfth-century Tuscany by Chris Wickham, the transition in court practice outside England has been neglected.


Aschkenas ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-244
Author(s):  
Markus J. Wenninger

AbstractThis study analyzes the formulation »Jews and (other) merchants« as it appears in sources from the 9th to the early 11th centuries. It addresses Michael Toch’s thesis with an aim to clarify the historical meaning of such formulations. By doing so, this study sheds light on how specific social differences between Jewish and non-Jewish merchants arose, while economic activities among both groups remained the same. Both Jews and non-Jews traded in the whole Frankish Empire and beyond. Both groups, therefore, took part in the lucrative as well as extensive slave trade, which was an essential element of the long-distance trading of the early Middle Ages.


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