Steven A. Epstein is Ahmanson-Murphy Distinguished Professor of Medieval History at the University of Kansas. He is the author of several books, including The Talents of Jacopo de Varagine: A Genoese Mind in Medieval Europe and Speaking of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity, and Human Bondage in Italy, both from Cornell, and The Medieval Discovery of Nature.
"Scholars with specialisms outside Italy will find a great deal of interest in this book and many intriguing parallels with systems of slavery elsewhere... Epstein's persuasive notion of the corrupting and normalizing language of medieval slavery will effect a permanent change in the way in which Italian slavery will be approached in the future. His pioneering, well written and constructed study is very timely, and it is to be hope that it will provide a lead for other much needed investigations of the culture of Italian slavery, both historical and interdisciplinary."-Kate Lowe, Slavery and Abolition "Steven Epstein's study of slavery in medieval Italy focuses on language, the ways people talked or wrote about slaves in a variety of contexts and the ways slaves talked about themselves. He makes it clear that slavery's significance in Italian history is more cultural than economic; although he does discuss the kinds of work that slaves did, he is more concerned with the intellectual and social implications of markets than with quantifying the contributions of slaves to production... A final contribution of Epstein's work is to set slavery in the context of servanthood and poverty. Servants and poor laborers were not legally property, but their lives might be in effect quite similar to those of slaves, and the kind of language used about them could be similar as well."-Ruth Mazo Karras, Speculum "Speaking of Slavery argues that Italian words specifically, and Italy's spoken culture generally, supported the owning and exploiting of humans, thus mainstreaming ideas about cultural superiority and inferiority that are still evident in Italian nomenclature today... Epstein's study is successful on two fronts. First, he successfully challenges the alienation of discussions of New World slavery to the American context; moreover, he demonstrates that the attitudes of explorers like Christopher Columbus cannot be separated from preexisting slave traditions and language traditions. While the international slave market lost its stronghold long ago, the language established to support it still shapes ideas about race. In the end, the relationship between early Italian slavery and Italian ideas about ethnicity is still evident in the language used to talk about color and race, specifically the language reserved for immigrant laborers and ethnic minorities living in Italy today."-Audrey Kerr, Sixteenth Century Journal "In his important book, Steven Epstein demonstrates the ways in which Italian slavery endures as a rhetorical topos and as an often distorted historical memory. Originally conceived and thoroughly researched, Speaking of Slavery is a significant accomplishment."-Paul Freedman, Yale University "This is book is that rare event, a truly original work on an important and much discussed subject. Epstein's work will profoundly change the ways in which we think about slavery in the context of European culture."-James Given, University of California, Irvine "Narratives of European modernity often assume too sharp a break with the pre-modern past. In this fine and nuanced study of the (largely) non-racial slavery of medieval Italy, Steven Epstein not only retrieves for historical memory an insufficiently known episode of the Old World's past. He also shows how the normalization through language of human servitude would provide a discursive foundation for the racial slavery of the New World, and leave a poisoned linguistic legacy for a modernity characterized simultaneously by freedom and equality for some and bondage and inequality for others."-Charles Mills, author of The Racial Contract
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