Closing Keynote Lecture: “Searching for Magdalena”

“Searching for Magdalena (or, Why a Medievalist is Reading Saidiya Hartman and Other Notes from the Archive)”

Daniel Smail, Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of History at Harvard University

Saturday, March 26th, 2022 | 5:45–7:15 pm EST
Tinkham Veale University Center, Ballroom A

Abstract: Two decades ago, the author, while working in the archives of the city of Marseille, stumbled across a lawsuit from 1406 setting a woman named Magdalena Coline against a shipwright named Peire Huguet. Magdalena was a Berber woman who had been enslaved to Peire for more than a decade and was now suing her former enslaver over a small debt. This paper describes the author’s subsequent efforts to use the fragmentary clues available in the archives to piece together Magdalena’s life history and that of her enslaver. This process invites the question that lies at the heart of this paper: does the moral duty to tell the histories of marginalized peoples authorize the use of imaginative reconstructions of those histories?

*Please note that masks are required for attending Vagantes conference events.

Register for the keynote lectures at (https://forms.gle/b59nSp5Wb1aWRU1p8).
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The 21st Vagantes Conference on Medieval Studies could not take place without the generous support of our sponsors. We would like the thank the generosity of the following institutions and groups (in alphabetical order) for providing us with the resources necessary to make this conference happen:

–Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities Special Projects Grant
–Cleveland Museum of Art
–Department of Art History and Art at CWRU
–Department of Music at CWRU
–Graduate Association of Medieval Studies at CWRU
–Graduate Student Council at CWRU
–The Medieval Academy of America/Graduate Student Committee Grant for Innovation in Community Building and Professionalization
–School of Graduate Studies at CWRU