TY - JOUR
AU1 - Ortiz, Joseph M.
AB - Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/modern-language-quarterly/article-pdf/85/1/115/2074497/115ortiz.pdf by DEEPDYVE INC user on 12 April 2024 Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England. By Urvashi Chakravarty. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. 295 pp. This book takes as its starting point a long-standing truism: that slavery did not exist—and could not have existed—in England. It meticulously exposes the tenuousness of this claim by showing how the language and practice of service in early modern England were founded on a deeply entrenched ideology of slavery. The book draws on a large and diverse archive of literary and historical sources: canonical and noncanonical plays, university dramas, print and manuscript poems, translations of Greek and Latin texts, pedagogical treatises, dictionaries, and indenture contracts. Through a careful examination of this material, Urvashi Chakravarty shows that, far from being inimical to slavery, English culture at this crucial point in history strategically managed the porous boundary between service and slavery, and between indenture and bondage, through a familiar set of discursive practices that she aptly terms “fictions of consent.” Throughout Fictions of Consent Chakravarty argues that for a culture of service to function as it did in early modern England, it needed first and foremost 
TI - Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England
JF - Modern Language Quarterly
DO - 10.1215/00267929-10928986
DA - 2024-03-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/duke-university-press/fictions-of-consent-slavery-servitude-and-free-service-in-early-modern-4lm0tvRHk8
SP - 115
EP - 117
VL - 85
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -