02/07/2026 09:00 - 11:10

HALL: Pola A208

Contact: Chizzolini B.

Chair: Di Nepi S., Giannini M.C.

This panel examines how enslaved women in early modern Europe and the Mediterranean navigated the pressures, constraints, and opportunities embedded in processes of religious conversion. By bringing together the work of Chizzolini, Abend, and Jaffe, it investigates conversion not as a unidirectional act of assimilation but as a dynamic field of negotiation shaped by overlapping systems of coercion, religious authority, and systems of power within households.
Chizzolini shows how the baptisms of enslaved Muslim and Jewish women in Medicean Tuscany functioned both as an instrument of grand ducal policy and as one of the few avenues through which captives could seek protection, mitigate mistreatment, or alter their symbolic status. Abend examines cases from seventeenth-century Spain in which enslaved women accused of renouncing God mobilized the jurisdiction of the Spanish Inquisition to challenge their masters' violence, revealing how the language of apostasy could be transformed into a tactical resource. Jaffe analyzes the complex trajectories of enslaved women in converso households in Italy, where informal judaizing and contested forms of religious practice exposed competing Christian and Jewish claims over their identities.
Together, the papers aim to demonstrate that conversion—Christian or Jewish, formal or informal, strategic or coerced—was a crucial arena in which enslaved women in early modern Europe confronted structures of domination while forging fragile yet meaningful forms of agency