02/07/2026 17:20 - 19:30

HALL: Pola - A108

Contact: Jackson-Eade J.

Chair: Tarantino G.

This panel examines how charitable and religious institutions shaped, exploited, and mediated the lives of enslaved women across the early modern Catholic Mediterranean. Mobilizing case studies from Florence, Livorno, and Lisbon, the papers argue that charitable institutions were ambivalent spaces, aimed to cater for the salvation of enslaved women while also reinforcing and reproducing gendered, racialised, and religious inequalities.
In sixteenth-century Florence, the Ospedale degli Innocenti relied on the reproductive and domestic labour of enslaved wetnurses while simultaneously receiving and baptising their abandoned children, revealing the racialised and religious logics that shaped the exploitation of enslaved women and the future of their offspring within Catholic institutions.
In the same years, in Lisbon, the experiences of Maghrebi washerwomen sentenced by the Inquisition to serve in the Royal Hospital highlight the convergence of punitive and charitable structures. Their skilled yet stigmatised labour made them indispensable to the daily functioning of the hospital, while their coerced service was framed as a moral rehabilitation into Catholic society.
The third paper explores the forced artisanal labour of enslaved Muslim women in Livorno who crafted components of their baptismal garments. The ceremony of baptism, materially staged by a charitable institution, relied both on the symbolic purity of Christian ritual and the economic utility of enslaved women's craftsmanship.
Together, the papers illuminate how charitable institutions managed poverty and welfare while controlling the bodies and labour of enslaved women, whose presence destabilised notions of domestic order and civic responsibility. They demonstrate that charitable practices and related religious rituals were entangled with quotidian labour regimes and the management of enslaved women's bodies, through processes that naturalised, prolonged, and legitimised gendered inequality.