PhD defence by Gabriel Farrugia
This thesis offers a cultural history of sailors on the galleys of early modern Malta by approaching the senses as culturally constructed and historically situated forms of experience. Drawing primarily on Inquisitorial trial records, alongside artistic representations, regulations, memoirs, and material evidence, the study places the sailor and his confessor at the centre of analysis in order to explore how faith, otherness, and community were sensed, negotiated, and remembered at sea in a post-Tridentine Mediterranean world.
The argument in this book is that questioning each sense in relation to emotions, material culture, and narrative construction offers a productive way of engaging with the culture of early modern Catholic seafarers in the Mediterranean. Such an approach not only helps make sense of life at sea but also foregrounds a fundamental early modern concern: the significance of the senses in everyday experience. Inquisitors, chaplains, and the galley's ‘parishioners’ were all deeply invested in this question.
The title’s play on words suggests that the aim of this project is to present what galley labourers physically (through the outer senses) and conceptually (through the inner senses) felt while at sea, a sea that was culturally perceived, and where a life on board was experienced as a space for daily practices to be performed and a notion of self to be shaped. The ‘feeling all at sea’ (feeling a sense of disorientation) I propose is linked to my conclusion that being at sea placed individuals in many contexts that raised moral doubts of right or wrong that ultimately led them to be vigilant of one another and share their thoughts, as well as sins, with their confessors and before the Inquisitor in Malta.
The narrative is guided by two historical figures, the sailor Gabriello Pulis and the galley chaplain Fra Fabrizio Cagliola, whose experiences and writings provide complementary perspectives on life aboard the galleys.
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