Did you know that the Catholic Church didn't formally declare slavery to be against canon law and a sin until the 20th century? In The Slaves of the Churches, Mary Sommar traces the history of such attitudes in Europe and the Mediterranean world back to Christianity's earliest centuries and then forward to roughly the end of the thirteenth century. (This is when, she argues, canon law on the topic had pretty much attained the form it would hold for the next 500+ years.) Sommar's focus is largely on legal, to a lesser extent on theological, texts concerning slavery and the Church's attitudes towards enslaved/unfree people who were owned by Church institutions.

As a compendium of references to enslavement and unfree peoples in various medieval texts, Slaves of the Churches certainly has its uses (now I know that there was a 3rd-century enslaved treadmill worker who became pope and is now the patron saint of cemetery workers!). Bringing attention specifically to this topic is I think important, since the fact that the institutional church enslaved people is still an under-acknowledged aspect of history. (Did you know that papal galleys until about 1700 were crewed by enslaved Muslims? However, I found the precision of Sommar's arguments to be lacking at times, and had question marks about her analysis of some sources. Given the density of the prose/specialisation of the topic, one for an academic audience only. ( )