Book Talk with Jenny Shaw

About This Event

This event is a talk with Dr. Jenny Shaw about her new book, which investigates the lives of five women who bore at least twenty children by the same prominent Barbados enslaver and politician in the seventeenth century. Two were his elite English wives, two were women he enslaved, one was a white servant. They first encountered one another on a plantation named Rendezvous in Christ Church parish. Following the death of his second wife, the two enslaved women and the servant traveled to England where they and their children survived and even thrived in early eighteenth-century London. In this talk Jenny Shaw discusses the long, winding, and fraught archival path that first alerted her to this polygynous household, and the equally challenging process of working out how to write a history that does justice to the lives of the remarkable women and children at its heart.

Featured Guests

• Jenny Shaw, Professor of History, University of Alabama