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Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt : Female Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture / Eve Krakowski.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2017]Copyright date: ©2018Description: 1 online resource (360 p.) : 2 halftones. 12 line illus. 2 tablesContent type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780691191638
  • 9781400887842
Subject(s): Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources: Available additional physical forms:
  • Issued also in print.
Contents:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Technical Notes -- Abbreviations -- INTRODUCTION -- PART I. WOMEN IN A PATRONAGE CULTURE -- Chapter 1. The Family -- Chapter 2. The Courts and the Law -- PART II. UNMARRIED DAUGHTERS -- Chapter 3. A Ripened Fig: Age at First Marriage -- Chapter 4. The Economics of Female Adolescence -- Chapter 5. A Virgin in Her Father's House: Modesty, Mobility, and Social Control -- PART III. BECOMING A WIFE -- Chapter 6. Marriage Choices -- Chapter 7. Defining Marriage Legal Agreements and Their Uses -- Chapter 8. In the Marital Household -- CONCLUSION -- Bibliography -- Index of Geniza Documents Cited -- Index of Jewish and Islamic Texts Cited -- General Index
Summary: Much of what we know about life in the medieval Islamic Middle East comes from texts written to impart religious ideals or to chronicle the movements of great men. How did women participate in the societies these texts describe? What about non-Muslims, whose own religious traditions descended partly from pre-Islamic late antiquity?Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt approaches these questions through Jewish women's adolescence in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt and Syria (c. 969-1250). Using hundreds of everyday papers preserved in the Cairo Geniza, Eve Krakowski follows the lives of girls from different social classes-rich and poor, secluded and physically mobile-as they prepared to marry and become social adults. She argues that the families on whom these girls depended were more varied, fragmented, and fluid than has been thought. Krakowski also suggests a new approach to religious identity in premodern Islamic societies-and to the history of rabbinic Judaism. Through the lens of women's coming-of-age, she demonstrates that even Jews who faithfully observed rabbinic law did not always understand the world in rabbinic terms. By tracing the fault lines between rabbinic legal practice and its practitioners' lives, Krakowski explains how rabbinic Judaism adapted to the Islamic Middle Ages.Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt offers a new way to understand how women took part in premodern Middle Eastern societies, and how families and religious law worked in the medieval Islamic world.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Technical Notes -- Abbreviations -- INTRODUCTION -- PART I. WOMEN IN A PATRONAGE CULTURE -- Chapter 1. The Family -- Chapter 2. The Courts and the Law -- PART II. UNMARRIED DAUGHTERS -- Chapter 3. A Ripened Fig: Age at First Marriage -- Chapter 4. The Economics of Female Adolescence -- Chapter 5. A Virgin in Her Father's House: Modesty, Mobility, and Social Control -- PART III. BECOMING A WIFE -- Chapter 6. Marriage Choices -- Chapter 7. Defining Marriage Legal Agreements and Their Uses -- Chapter 8. In the Marital Household -- CONCLUSION -- Bibliography -- Index of Geniza Documents Cited -- Index of Jewish and Islamic Texts Cited -- General Index

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Much of what we know about life in the medieval Islamic Middle East comes from texts written to impart religious ideals or to chronicle the movements of great men. How did women participate in the societies these texts describe? What about non-Muslims, whose own religious traditions descended partly from pre-Islamic late antiquity?Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt approaches these questions through Jewish women's adolescence in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt and Syria (c. 969-1250). Using hundreds of everyday papers preserved in the Cairo Geniza, Eve Krakowski follows the lives of girls from different social classes-rich and poor, secluded and physically mobile-as they prepared to marry and become social adults. She argues that the families on whom these girls depended were more varied, fragmented, and fluid than has been thought. Krakowski also suggests a new approach to religious identity in premodern Islamic societies-and to the history of rabbinic Judaism. Through the lens of women's coming-of-age, she demonstrates that even Jews who faithfully observed rabbinic law did not always understand the world in rabbinic terms. By tracing the fault lines between rabbinic legal practice and its practitioners' lives, Krakowski explains how rabbinic Judaism adapted to the Islamic Middle Ages.Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt offers a new way to understand how women took part in premodern Middle Eastern societies, and how families and religious law worked in the medieval Islamic world.

Issued also in print.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 27. Sep 2021)