Fellows 2025

Tamar Herzig

Professor of History, University of Tel Aviv

Resident at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:

September 2025

Research topic at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:

»Female Slavery in Mediterranean Catholic Europe, 1500–1800«

Project outline:

More than one million, and perhaps as many as two million individuals were enslaved in the Catholic-ruled regions of the early modern Mediterranean. Despite evidence of the prevalence of enslaved women, and the fact that they constituted the bulk of the enslaved population in some areas, scholarship on bondage in Mediterranean Europe from 1500 to 1800 retains a strong androcentric bias. Transcending national historiographic traditions, this project breaks new ground by providing, for the first time, a comprehensive investigation of women’s enslavement and its wide-ranging implications during the pivotal period in European history that encompassed the Renaissance, the Reformations, the onset of European colonialism, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment. Whereas extant scholarship emphasizes religious, political, and economic aspects, FemSMed’s goal is to uncover the sexual, familial, and broader social contexts of these aspects. By elucidating the long-term consequences of women’s enslavement, it further aims to reveal the gendered mechanisms of racialization and ethnicization and raise awareness of Europe’s multiethnic and multireligious heritage. (Tamar Herzig)

Research partner:

Tamar Herzig is a fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften at the invitation of Xenia von Tippelskirch, Professor for the History of Religious Dynamics at Goethe University Frankfurt and Director of the Frankfurt Institut franco-allemand de sciences historiques et sociales (IFRA-SHS). Her stay is funded by Goethe University's interdisciplinary field of potential »Religion and De:Toxification (RelTox)«.

Scholarly profile of Tamar Herzig

Tamar Herzig is the Konrad Adenauer Chair of Comparative European History and Director of Fred W. Lessing Institute for European History and Civilization at Tel Aviv University. In 2023, she was granted the ERC advanced grant of the European Research Council for the project »Female Slavery in Mediterranean Catholic Europe, 1500–1800« (FemSMed). The project will run from 2024 to 2029.

Website:
Please find more information about Tamar Herzig here.

Main areas of research:

Religious, social, and gender history of early modern Europe and the Mediterranean, with a focus on Renaissance Italy

Selected publications:

»Religious Conflicts, Enslavement, and Sexual Violence«, in: Renaissance and Reformation/ Renaissance et Réforme 48:3 (Summer 2025) (Special issue on Rethinking Conflict and Sexual Violence in Early Modern Europe, ed. Cristelle Baskins and Péter Bokody) (forthcoming), pp. 13-56.
»Enslavement, Religion, and Cultural Commemoration in Livorno«, in: Religions 14:5 (May 2023) (Special issue on Rethinking Catholicism in Early Modern Italy: Gender, Space, Mobility, ed. Diego Pirillo and John Christopoulos), pp. 1-13.
»Slavery and Interethnic Sexual Violence: A Multiple Perpetrator Rape in Seventeenth-Century Livorno«, in: American Historical Review 127:1 (March 2022), pp. 94-122.
A Convert’s Tale: Art, Crime, and Jewish Apostasy in Renaissance Italy, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 2019.
›Christ Transformed into a Virgin Woman‹: Lucia Brocadelli, Heinrich Institoris, and the Defense of the Faith, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura 2013.

Tamar Herzig

Scholarly profile of Tamar Herzig

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