Across the Religious Divide: Women, Property, and Law in the Wider Mediterranean (ca. 1300-1800)(Routledge Research in Gender and History)

Examining women's property rights in different societies across the entire medieval and early modern Mediterranean, this volume introduces a unique comparative perspective to the complexities of gender relations in Muslim, Jewish, and Christian communities. Through individual case studies based on urban and rural, elite and non-elite, religious and secular communities, Across the Religious Divide presents the only nuanced history of the region that incorporates peripheral areas such as Portugal, the Aegean Islands, Dalmatia, and Albania into the central narrative. By bridging the present-day notional and cultural divide between Muslim and Judeo-Christian worlds with geographical and thematic coherence, this collection of essays by top international scholars focuses on women in courts of law and sources such as notarial records, testaments, legal commentaries, and administrative records to offer the most advanced research and illuminate real connections across boundaries of gender, religion, and culture.

Table of Contents:
List of Maps and Tables. Introduction. Jutta Gisela Sperling and Shona Kelly Wray. 1. Regulating Sex: A Brief Survey of Medieval Copto-Arabic Canons. Maryann Shenoda. 2. The Boundaries of Affection: Women and Property in Late Medieval Avignon. Joëlle Rollo-Koster. 3. Women in Court in Early Fourteenth-Century Venice. Linda Guzzetti. 4. Testamentary Bequests of Urban Noblewomen on the Eastern Adriatic Coast in the Fourteenth Century: The Case of Zadar. Branka Gbravac. 5. Women, Testaments, and Notarial Culture in Bologna's Contado (1348). Shona Kelly Wray. 6. Women and Property in Fifteenth-Century Umbria. Karen Frank. 7. The Power to Divide? Germania Marriage Contracts in Early Fifteenth- Century Valencia. Dana Wessell Lightfoot. 8. In the Shadow of the Campo: Sienese Women and Their Families (ca. 1400-1600). Elena Brizio. 9. Women, Marriage, and Family in Istrian Communes in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. Marija Mogorovic Crljenko. 10. Marriage, Kinship, and Property in Portuguese Testaments (1649–1650). Jutta Gisela Sperling. 11. Women, Family, and Property in Early Modern Venice. Anna Bellavitis. 12. Jewish Women in Eighteenth-Century Modena: Individual, Household, and Collective Properties. Federica Francesconi. 13. Counting on Kin: Women and Property in Eighteenth-Century Cairo. Mary Ann Fay. 14. From Mahalle (Neighborhood) to the Market and the Courts: Women, Credit, and Property in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul. Fariba Zarinebaf. 15. Kin and Marriage in Two Aegean Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century. Evdoxios Doxiadis. 16. Women as Outsiders: The Inheritance of Agricultural Land in the Ottoman Empire. Colin Imber. Contributors. References. Index.

About the Author :
Jutta Sperling, Hampshire College. Her main publications include Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice 1550-1650 (1999) as well as articles on the abolition of clandestine marriages at the Council of Trent and on Portuguese women's property rights. Her current research interests focus on iconographies of lactation in Renaissance and Baroque art. Shona Kelly Wray, University of Missouri-Kansas City. Her research incorporates various aspects of the social history of fourteenth-century Bologna. She has published articles on women, family, and inheritance, notarial culture, the social experience of the Black Death, and peace and dispute settlements. Her first book, Communities and Crisis: Bologna during the Black Death, was published in 2009.