Dr. Paula R. Curtis

Perry is analyzing a short text (letter or memorandum) that was exchanged by Jewish merchants to sell and transport an enslaved woman from Cairo to Alexandria. It provides a fragmented view of global medieval slave trade.

Reading this along with other documents and narratives, Perry reconstructs the ways in which merchants organized this trade, and argues that medieval sources can also reveal how enslaved people experienced and sometimes themselves shaped this trade.

The text is a fragment, making it difficult to tell a full account. So how to flesh out the context? How can we write a social history in the global Middle Ages based on surviving fragments? Especially for marginalized groups- how to do history from below w/ vast scale in relief?

Perry's research focuses on thousands of documents housed in a synagogue in Fustat (Old Cairo)- a place they housed unused manuscripts.

The geography we see from these networks can stretch from Tunisia to India. There's a whole host of and layers within the enslaved peoples in Egypt, domestic labor, sexual labor, others. The density of the archive helps us understand interconnections between many ppl involved.

Some of these materials can be found in Cambridge Digital Library (https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/ ) and Friedberg Genizah Project (http://pr.genizah.org/TheCairoGenizah.aspx …).

https://twitter.com/cerydel/status/1094263381320699904 …

Why call this a memo and not a letter? People who study Genizah letters can often recognize them very quickly from their materiality- folded in certain ways to conceal content and show addresses. Close examinations can show patterns of reuse or "scribblings" that are valuable.

The letter shows directions as to what the merchants should do with a slave girl being sent to Alexandria, discussions of payment, who she's being purchased for. Perry discusses issues in translation he had that led him to reinterpret the document. We are all always learning!

#GlobalMiddleAgesWAC students, take note! Experts are also students.

https://twitter.com/cerydel/status/1094265252353662978 …

Perry notes that texts indicate kidnapping for slavery often happened, seizing and shipping 1-3 people along with a large body of other cargo, rather than huge ships dedicated solely to shipping slaves.

Specialized slave merchants appeared here and there, some of them often worked out of their homes, not operating out of large markets as one might expect. This information coming from fragmentary manuals.

Process of inspections were invasive, and slaves themselves might demonstrate or hide knowledge to affect transactions, share knowledge among one another. But we only have fragmentary history, a "series of related snapshots."

Into discussion! Helmut Puff (@UMich) kicks us off. He notes that @Craig_A_Perry is doing the work of both historians and philologists.

This, Puff says, is reflective of our attempt to come together here and leverage the collective to advance our learning.

We might also consider the document as agent in this situation. What is the relationship between behaviors and texts? They don't simply reveal, but are part of the story, ensuring certain codes persisted.

How can we speak sensibly of the subaltern? Puff asks. He brings up Spivak's work on "Can the Subaltern Speak?" as a touchstone for this question.

How can we give contour to the silences that make these figures a powerful presence? Can we collectively think of other ways, modes, narrative forms, that get at these issues?