International Symposium, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg & University of Bielefeld Bielefeld University (Germany), 13-14 April 2018 Deadline for submissions: 9 August 2017 Until recently manifestations of piracy as well as of its state-sanctioned counterpart, privateering, were mostly discussed as geographically isolated cultural phenomena. Depictions of armed robbery at sea in the early modern period have traditionally tended to focus […]
Book Review by James H Thomas on Daphne Palmer Geanacopoulos, The Pirate Next Door: The Untold Story of Eighteenth Century Pirates’ Wives, Families and Communities (Carolina Academic Press: Durham, North Carolina, 2017), 147pp. £11-12 (Kindle and Paperback). This is a slim volume which promises much, delving ‘into the inner lives of pirates, focusing on their […]
Pirates have many names—freebooters, brethren of the coast, members of the company, buccaneers. Throughout the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, thousands of pirates stalked the seas, attacking merchant vessels trading in the West Indies, West Africa, and North America. This period of violence and thievery has been well documented and immortalized as the ‘Golden […]
The practice of gibbeting, also known more specifically as hanging in irons, or hanging in chains, was a particularly macabre punishment for a variety of convicted felons, and yet it is the image of the pirate cadaver swinging eerily in the breeze, which appears to have become most engrained in popular culture since the eighteenth […]
