From the mid-thirteenth to the late eighteenth century, millions of women, men, girls, and boys were sold into slavery in Mediterranean Europe. Recent scholarship has called attention to the significance of gender in shaping individuals’ slavery experience in premodern Spain, Italy, France and Malta. Invited participants to the conference include the leading contributors to this burgeoning historiography as well as more junior scholars, whose work is informed by theoretical advances in the sociological and anthropological study of enslavement. Challenging the accepted periodization of the history of Mediterranean bondage, the papers presented in the conference will delineate both the continuities and the transformations that characterized the interplay of gender and enslavement during the half millennium that encompassed the late medieval and early modern eras. They will offer transcultural explorations of the social contexts of enslavement, and of how they intersected with the economic, political, and religious aspects of the trade in human beings in the Mediterranean. We will explore the role of gender in shaping the enslavement of Muslims, sub-Saharan Africans, Orthodox Christians, and Jews in Mediterranean Europe from a comparative perspective. A key topic we will address throughout the conference sessions will be the gendered mechanisms of racialization and ethnicization, as they were manifested in the main typologies of enslaving non-Catholics and non-Europeans.