Spring Update 2025
It’s halfway through 2025 and MMoR is drawing close to the end of our initial, funded period. It’s been another busy term though, and as always, we welcome an opportunity to reflect and take stock of our activity, and everything we learned in its course.
In March, Carolin and Hannah travelled to Boston to participate in the 71st Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America (20-22 March 2025).
Carolin was pleasantly surprised to see a large number of panels and papers speaking directly to her research interests on Iberia, and the Atlantic and Mediterranean world. Among the panels she attended, some that particularly stood included a roundtable organised by Nick Jones, centring and expanding their work on Black Performances, a panel on Global encounters (organized by Marina Iní and Maria Gloria Tominelli), and a set of papers on Indigenous and Black women (organized by Marcella Hayes and Michelle McKinley). The latter included an inspiring paper by Michelle McKinley on cross-Atlantic mobility of criadas attached to Spanish households, in which she explored the term “nacida en mi casa”, which frequently appeared in Seville travel petition records as both an identifier of enslaved women and as a passport crediting their legitimate return travel to the Americas.
Our MMoR panel was “Things and Remedies: Foreign, Enslaved and Marginalized Sellers and Healthcare Providers in Early Modern Europe”, co-organized by Carolin and Federica Gigante (Cambridge/Villa I Tatti), the future holder of the ERC Starting Grant “Unveiling Networks: Slavery and the European Encounter with Islamic Material Culture (1580–1700)(UNSEEN)”, and chaired by Hannah. The panel’s idea was twofold 1) to bring together the often separate scholarly interests in the circulation of material culture and medical practices and 2) to shift the focus to marginalized people and their role in offering and circulating things and remedies in the early modern Mediterranean. Lavinina Ghambini presented on Greek Peddlers in Italy, showing through selected profiles the proximity between material everyday objects and those for medical use. Achille Marotta gave a great insight into the various financial strategies of Muslim galley slaves in Italian port cities in their pursuit of freedom and community building. In sharing a similar focus on geography and individuals, Federica Gigante discussed how “merchant slaves” were involved in the exchange of Islamicate objects and associated knowledge that entered European collections and scientific treatises. Finally, Carolin shared pan-Mediterranean case studies of marginalized healers, discussing their interconnectedness through individual movements, but also through the intertwined mobility of practices, materia medica and materia magica.
Hannah participated in the Roundtable “Asian and African Perspectives on the Global Renaissance II (Africa)” organized by Zoltán Biedermann and brilliantly chaired by Lexie Cook. The roundtable’s discussion made clear how little represented Africanists and historians of Africa are within RSA; there is an urgent need to include their research if we wanted to get to more profound answers to many of the questions raised during the discussion.
In amongst rich offerings on calligraphy, water and engineering, a particular conference highlight for Hannah was the Society for Renaissance Studies Keynote Lecture, given by Nandini Das (Oxford). Nandini is well known for her inspirational project TIDE and her recent prizewinning book on the first British attempts at diplomacy in early modern England. Her keynote lecture took us in a new direction, winding through the category of the ‘ruderal’ to think about ecology, perseverance, value and resilience. It was beautiful and erudite, but inspirational.
We also had the chance to connect with our former colleague and continuing collaborator Eli Cumings, who spoke at the first session of the conference and still managed to pack out the room. It was great to see her work develop. Overall, it was a wonderful conference: an opportunity to see the work thrive by friends that have been part of and shaped MMoR in the last years, as well as to discover new research by new friends and colleagues.
May welcomed not only more sunshine and warmer temperatures, but also many scholars to our own MMoR “Medicine, Slavery, and Race in the Atlantic World (15 - 17 May 2025)” at King’s College London. It’s impossible in just a few paragraphs to summarise three extremely full days of brilliant papers, insightful discussions and the meeting of scholars from a diverse range of themes, periods and places.
What was consistent throughout was the atmosphere of collegiality, generosity and kindness that filled the room during every single day. This was paired with critical, yet constructive interventions, guided by a genuine interest in the work of each scholar, regardless of the point in their careers. A highlight for everyone were the two panels of lightning talks, in which early career scholars offered short summaries of new work on the intimate geographies of plantations and sexual disease, puberty on the west coast of Africa, ‘slave surgeons’, cachexia, plants and specimens in the Sloane collection, abortion, obstetrics, and kin networks on St Thomas.
It was exciting to see these intersections take root in new work, which will certainly shape the field in years to come.
During the three days, the discussions frequently turned to the issue of the construction of race, prompting participants to ask: Where and how do we see race making reflected in the sources? Can we read race into anything? When does it stop being about race from an actor’s point of view? When is it still relevant to identify racial markers, from a legacy standpoint and in light of their social, political and legal implications nowadays?
Bringing scholars together from different geographies (US, UK, Chile, Brazil, Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, etc) and different scholarly approaches to history (intellectual and social historians, history of science/medicine) made us see above all the wide ramifications and complexities involved when thinking about the actual entanglements of medicine and race. In particular, we’ve come to understand how much theorized articulations of human differences and the practical enactment of these racial theories are closely entangled. Bridging theory and practice as well as bridging academic landscapes (the anglophone world with underrepresented Brazilian studies, for example) are important undertakings for the future of our field.
Tasked with delivering the closing remarks of the conference, Lauren Kassell came up with an innovative method of asking everyone to write down 5 keywords to characterize the conference and 1-2 questions they felt resulted from the conference. The collection of the questions, which we feel could be agenda setting, will be published shortly on our website.
We thank Becca Taite and Niharika Krishna for making sure that everything went smoothly before, during and after the conference, and all speakers and audience members, of whom many travelled not short distances to make it to King’s. We are eternally grateful to you all!
These were particularly full events, but by no means the extent of our activity. Surekha Davies, who gave a keynote lecture at our first conference, visited us for a launch event connected to her new book, Humans: A Monstrous History. Carolin gave papers in Münster, and Cambridge, and participated in an online conference on the Canaries. Our archival network also continued to meet, and our resultant toolkit is currently in the final stages of graphic design – watch this space for updates.
Perhaps most importantly, we also published the third series of our blog on slavery, medicine, and race. Featuring posts by Gutiele Goçalves dos Santos, Halle-Mackenzie Ashby, Adam Bridgen, Michael Aidan Pope, Akosua Paries-Osei, Caludia Stella Geremia, Lexie Cook, and our own Carolin Schmitz, these posts attend to particular source material and offer great insight into new and upcoming research.
Research also continues. In April Hannah travelled to Philadelphia to complete work on the financial records of a Jamaican medical practitioner, and in May she made her first visit to Antigua, where she worked in the amazing National Museum and the National Archives, looking at wills and sessional records, and saw the Nelson Dockyard, and “Betty’s Hope”. We’re grateful to Gavin and his highly professional and helpful team for facilitating this work.
Summer is just around the corner, but we have a busy few weeks before we take a break. Building on last year’s “Crafting Race” workshop, this Friday, (June 20), we welcome Carina Johnson, Lily Freeman Jones, Zoltán Biedermann, Hannah Lee, and Ningfen Wang to Kings, where we will workshop five precirculated papers addressing race-making by and amongst artisans. Next week, twenty-five scholars arrive to participate in a two-day workshop on Barbados and Britain. Organised with Misha Ewan in Sussex and Michael Bennett in Sheffield, this conference involves two keynote lectures which are open to the public, by Jenny Shaw and Susan Amussen, and a hands-on session in the Foyle Special Collections, where the amazing King’s librarians Katie Sambrook and Adam Ray have put together a range of material, featuring our rare annotations on Richard Ligon’s True and Exact History of Barbados (disclaimer to those unfamiliar with the text: it is neither true nor exact). This busy conference season will come to an end with the Society for Renaissance Studies Conference in Bristol (2-5 July), where Carolin and Michael Aidan Pope will be running a panel on legal frameworks and everyday experiences of enslavement and freedom in the Black Canary Islands.
Summer always brings a sense of new things. So in this season of winding down, it feels particularly exciting that we will welcome a new project ‘associate’... at the end of this week, Becca will begin a period of maternity leave. We are so thrilled for her (and her husband Ollie) as they begin this new chapter of their lives.