European Slaves: Christians in African Pirate Encounters (ESCAPE)

The proposed research project focuses on early modern - that is, mostly seventeenth- and eighteenth-century - survivor narratives by white Europeans who were enslaved by Islamic pirates on North Africa`s Barbary Coast. Centerpieces of the research effort are an anthology of shorter unedited German slave narratives and the first modern text edition and English translation of Johan Frisch`s Schauplatz Barbarischer Sclaverey (1666 and 1694), one of the most important and comprehensive specimens of this text type in German. Parallel to editing Frisch`s text, which draws on a plethora of accounts in French, English, and other languages, the project will provide a typological analysis of these histories, focusing on English and German texts first, and gradually exploring narratives in other languages as well. Unlike previous research, mostly carried out by historians on the phenomenon of white slavery as such, this project primarily focuses on survivor narratives from a literary perspective. These white slave histories will be treated as an independent narrative text type or genre, which shares features of the modern novel, but predates it by more than a century.

The ESCAPE project focused primarily on the literary aspect of Mediterranean piracy and captivity in the early modern period, i.e., texts by Europeans or Americans who produced narratives about their time as captives in North Africa. The project team collected and analyzed a large number of captivity accounts from more than a dozen European countries and the United States. Editions and translations of important narratives were made available for the first time in primary text anthologies. Conferences and collections of essays brought together the leading international scholars in the field of early modern Mediterranean piracy and slavery. Newspaper articles, radio broadcasts, and a large-scale museum exhibition made it possible to reach audiences beyond academia. Through a wide network and a large number of publications, the ESCAPE project made a major impact on the investigation of Barbary captivity narratives. Combining literary, historical, and cultural studies approaches, the project catered to the needs of scholarship in the field, and also reached a public beyond traditional university contexts.