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Speaker: Kate Lowe (I Tatti / Warburg Institute, University of London)
A small group of five enslaved people of sub-Saharan African ancestry was purchased in Portugal on behalf of the Medici and sent to Florence in the late 1540s. The group comprised three male children, one woman, and one young female child. Slavery was legally enshrined and routine on the Italian peninsula in the sixteenth century yet its lived experience was anything but homogeneous. Using documents from the Archivio di stato in Florence, this paper examines what is known about the prior biographies of these five, and compares lives under Medici ‘ownership’ within the group, revealing rather different trajectories and outcomes.
Kate Lowe is Associate Fellow at the Warburg Institute, University of London. She has taught at the Universities of London, Hong Kong, Cambridge, Birmingham and North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 2005 she co-edited Black Africans in Renaissance Europe and she has worked on various aspects of Africa in Renaissance Italy for over 20 years. In 2017 she co-curated A Cidade Global: Lisboa no Renascimento at the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon. She was the academic editor of the history monograph series I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History, published by Harvard University Press, between 2012 and 2020. Her latest book, Provenance and Possession: Global Acquisitions from the Portuguese Trading Empire in Renaissance Italy will be published by Princeton University Press in 2024.
Image: Florence, Palazzo vecchio, Sala di Penelope, Johannes Stradanus (known as Giovanni Stradano), tondo of Penelope at the loom, 1561-2
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