Program in Medieval Studies

A new history of slavery and the slave trade in the medieval Middle East based on the Cairo Geniza archive, with attention to such crucial topics as the slave trade in state diplomacy, the entanglements of gender and household slavery, and the lives of the enslaved.

This talk introduces medieval Sicily in its Muslim period, focusing on how this history was experienced, archived, imagined, and remembered by its native poets and writers, as well as the travelers who visited the island, during its political and cultural apogee, and the later years under the domination of the Norman kings.

A lecture by Prof. Warren Brown on an extraordinary manuscript fragment in out RBML: a leaf from an administrative book made at the Abbey of St. Martin, Tours (France) and dating to the 7th century which was later reinforced with a papyrus fragment written in Coptic Greek from Egypt.