The Money Launderer’s Daughter: A Tunisian Woman and a Slave Rumor in the Early Modern Mediterranean

FAIN: FEL-289438-23

Gillian Lee Weiss
Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland, OH 44106-1712)

Research and writing leading to a book about religious conversion in the early modern Mediterranean and the limits of the extant archival record.

The Money Launderer’s Daughter centers on a rumor. It originated with an esclave turc (enslaved Turk) on Louis XIV’s fleet of galleys. It concerned an Arabic-speaking Tunisian woman converted to Catholicism in Marseille. Provocative enough to spark a trans-Mediterranean diplomatic crisis, it left behind the faint traces of an early modern female life. Yet despite the assumptions of a servile rower who cast himself as her spiritual protector, Ursule de Léon had not been a Muslim before her baptism, but rather a Jew of Sephardic descent. Her travels and travails from 1678 – 1688 include three years in Algerian captivity, then liberation, marriage, and expulsion. Inspired by Rachel Cusk’s 2014 novel with a silent protagonist, this project features a subject who does not speak. It uses the words of others—a sailor, a merchant, a priest, a few consuls and several slaves—to summon an unfamiliar maritime world and to reflect on the possibilities and limits of writing history using hearsay.