The goal of the project was to contribute to a rethinking of the history of Gypsy groups in Europe in the modern era (16th, 17th, early 18th century), by applying an interdisciplinary interpretative paradigm to a specific case study: the Gypsy presence and circulation in three Western-Mediterranean areas of the Spanish Crown (Andalusia, Sicily, Sardinia). [The ethnonym ‘Gypsy’ is used here, as Roma/Rom would be anachronistic with respect to the forms ‘Gitanos’, ‘Zingari’ and variations found in the historical sources analysed]
The project had three main objectives:
1. Problematise and counter the traditional diasporic representation of Gypsies as perpetual travellers, kept in an inescapable position of social and economic marginality
2. Document and analyse the continuity of the Gypsy presence and their short-range mobility in the Western Mediterranean area
3. Investigate the strategies through which, in the modern era, Gypsies kept their group identity while also being part of the broader society.
The mono-dimensional interpretation of the Gypsies as a diasporic, nomadic and marginal minority relentlessly persecuted often depends on choosing royal ordinances, decrees and acts of Parliament, and synod proceedings, as primary sources. Due to their nature, these institutional sources do not usually offer details on the everyday life of Gypsy groups, but mainly of their repression. The hypothesis at the basis of Mediterranean Gypsies was that a different, more complex and nuanced history can surface if the analysis extends beyond the so-called Archives of Repression to include a broader range of primary sources documenting everyday life, such as parish funds, custom records and notarial deeds. Thus, a substantial corpus of original and mostly unpublished documents was collected via an extensive multi-lingual and multi-archival research conducted in Spain, Italy and the UK, and then investigated with an approach at the crossroads of transnational history, micro-history and historical anthropology.
The results of the project allow us to trace the movements of Gypsy individuals, families and groups across the Western Mediterranean area, to map out the economic and social relations they developed both among themselves and with other settled people, and to understand their articulated relationships with local and state institutions. The activities and the relational strategies elaborated by Gypsy women were also investigated as a specific case study, so as to ascertain their social role and agency, which went beyond the stereotypical image of the fortune-teller and enchantress; archival documents showed that Gipsy women worked in a variety of contexts, e.g. as weavers or field workers, and some were even active in professions traditionally associated with men, such as trading goods, particularly the horse trade.
