Join Sarah Christensen, Brown/Wheaton Faculty Fellow, History Department, for an upcoming Faculty Research Talk, Marriage as a Path to Freedom for Enslaved Women in the Early Middle Ages.

Presenters will begin by discussing their topic, and each session will close with a question and answer segment. All presentations are virtual and free and the Zoom link will be sent the day before this discussion.

Description: I examine how enslaved women in the early Middle Ages approached marriage and childbearing as means to secure emancipation. According to a long legal tradition dating to the Roman classical period and lingering in the law codes of both medieval western Europe and Byzantium, marriage offered enslaved women a change in social position as well as a specific transformation of legal status from unfree to free. Looking at legal documents and narrative sources, I examine how individual women strategically leveraged marriage and childbearing to achieve desires that included but were not limited to emancipation, and how these women calculated possibilities for improvement using knowledge of their legal status, social standing, and sexual value.

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