The collocation ‘voluntary servitude’ has -- as a range of scholars have shown -- a rich late antique and early modern history, and an enduring hold on modern life. Deriving at once from Plato’s dialogues, Cicero’s Offices, and Pauline theology, it is a collocation crystallised in the French vernacular by La Boétie’s striking mid-C16th century treatise on the subject, itself made famous by Montaigne’s celebrated decision not to publish it as the centre-piece to his Essais. Grounded in classical conceptions of public service, and revived as part of early modern resistance theory, it also runs through the bloodstream of Renaissance love poetry, as of religious devotion (then as now). My own work on this notion, with early modernity as its gravitational centre, investigates selected moments in the long history of ‘voluntary servitude’, from late antiquity to the present; as idea, as practice, and as performance; in literature as in political theory; in theatre, poetry, fiction, and film....