In 1387, a young Muslim woman from North Africa was captured on a galley in the Bay of Naples and brought to Marseille as a slave.
For more than 10 years, she was held in bondage to a shipwright and privateer named Peire Huguet.
Daniel Lord Smail tells the extraordinary story of Magdalena Coline, a woman who dared to file suit against the man who called himself her master, and whose passage from servitude to freedom raises tantalizing questions about how the people of her time made sense of slavery as a social category.
