Speaking of slavery
Subtitle: color, ethnicity, and human bondage in Italy
By: Steven A. Epstein.
Series: Conjunctions of religion & power in the medieval past
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2001
Place of publication: Ithaca
Language: eng
Number of pages: 215
Subjects: Slavery -- Italy -- History; Ethnicity -- Italy -- History
Description: "In this Work, Steven A. Epstein shows that the ways Italians employ words and think about race and labor are profoundly affected by the language used in medieval Italy to sustain a system of slavery. The author's findings about the surprising persistence of the "language of slavery" demonstrate the difficulty of escaping the legacy of a shameful past.".

"For Epstein, language is crucial to understanding slavery, for it preserves the hidden conditions of that institution. He begins his book by discussing the words used to conduct and describe slavery in Italy, from pertinent definitions given in early dictionaries, to the naming of slaves by their masters, to the ways in which bondage has been depicted by Italian writers from Dante to Primo Levi and Antonio Gramsci.

Epstein then probes Italian legal history, tracing the evolution of contracts for buying, selling, renting, and freeing people. Next he considers the behaviors of slaves and slave owners as a means of exploring how concepts of liberty and morality changed over time. He concludes by analyzing the language of the market, where medieval Italians used words to fix the prices of the people they bought and sold."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 199-207) and index.
Table of contents: title: The language of slavery; title: The language of the law; title: The human behavior of slavery; title: The language of the great economy.