Congratulations to affiliated faculty member Daniel Hershenzon who has received a Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies Fellowship for next academic year (2019-2020) for his research project entitled "Captive Objects: Religious Artifacts and Piracy in the Early Modern Mediterranean."

Captive Objects: Religious Artifacts and Piracy in the Early Modern Mediterranean

Captive Objects encapsulates how religious artifacts trapped in the maritime plunder economy became the contentious subject of conflicting claims by a host of actors. Religious artifacts—Korans and Bibles, prayer shawls, crosses, images of Christ and the Virgin Mary, and relics—circulated in their thousands in the early modern western Mediterranean, crisscrossing the boundaries between Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. This mobility was largely a byproduct of piracy to which 2 to 3 million persons from all sides fell fate between 1500 and 1800 and which intertwined Spain, Italy, Morocco, and Ottoman Algiers. Reconstructing objects’ trajectories and their involvement in human trafficking sheds new light on the experience of captivity and the practice of redemption, of both people and objects. More importantly, the project argues, the captivity of religious artifacts turned objects previously isolated in their respective realms into contentious objects that formed a distinct category and acted as religious boundary markers within and among confessions.