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What did it mean to be free in the premodern world? What did it mean to be a serf or enslaved? How was freedom and unfreedom experienced differently based on gender, geography, religion and space? This course explores the long history of slavery, freedom, and ‘unfreedom,’ in its many and various degrees. We will consider an array of source materials spanning law codes, personal narratives, manumission cases, chronicles, histories, and hagiographies, as well as non-written sources. How did practices of slavery and degrees of unfreedom during the Greek and Roman periods come to shape an understanding of those categories in early medieval Europe, in the Islamic world, and across the pre-modern Mediterranean? How were slavery and empire connected in the past? We will also focus on how scholars have written about slavery, manumission, and freedom and how power, difference, and ideals of freedom have been theorized over time. What methods have scholars employed to get at the experiences of those who were enslaved and silenced? And how have they attempted to narrate these histories differently?