[Bilimsel Haber] New book: Renegade Women: Gender, Identity, and Boundaries in the Early Modern Mediterranean

[Onur Inal]

Date: Tue, 24 May 2011 17:55:21 -0600
From: Eric Dursteler <Eric_Dursteler at byu.edu>

I'm pleased to announce the publication of my book:

Eric R Dursteler, Renegade Women: Gender, Identity, and Boundaries in
the Early Modern Mediterranean.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.  240 pp.
ISBN 9781421400716 (hdbk) ISBN 9781421400723 (paperback)

This book uses the stories of early modern women in the Mediterranean
who left their birthplaces, families, and religions to reveal the
complex space women of the period occupied socially and politically.

In the narrow sense, the word "renegade" as used in the early modern
Mediterranean referred to a Christian who had abandoned his or her
religion to become a Muslim. With Renegade Women, Eric R Dursteler
deftly redefines and broadens the term to include anyone who crossed
the era's and region's religious, political, social, and gender
boundaries. Drawing on archival research, he relates three tales of
women whose lives afford great insight into both the specific
experiences and condition of females in, and the broader cultural and
societal practices and mores of, the early Mediterranean.

Through Beatrice Michiel of Venice, who fled an overbearing husband to
join her renegade brother in Constantinople and took the name Fatima
Hatun, Dursteler discusses how women could convert and relocate in
order to raise their personal and familial status. In the parallel
tales of the Christian Elena Civalelli and the Muslim Mihale
Šatorovic, who both entered a Venetian convent to avoid unwanted,
arranged marriages, he finds courageous young women who used the
frontier between Ottoman and Venetian states to exercise a surprising
degree of agency over their lives. And in the actions of four Muslim
women of the Greek island of Milos—Aissè, her sisters Eminè and
Catigè, and their mother, Maria—who together left their home for Corfu
and converted from Islam to Christianity to escape Aissè's emotionally
and financially neglectful husband, Dursteler unveils how a woman's
attempt to control her own life ignited an international firestorm
that threatened Venetian-Ottoman relations.

A truly fascinating narrative of female instrumentality, Renegade
Women illuminates the nexus of identity and conversion in the early
modern Mediterranean through global and local lenses. Scholars of the
period will find this to be a richly informative and thoroughly
engrossing read.

"A gem. Beautifully written, creatively crafted, and thoroughly
researched, this is an erudite book, written with verve. It brings to
life the richness and vitality of Mediterranean societies in early
modern times. It also highlights the lack of historical grounding of
some recent popular views about the alleged religious and cultural
differences that separate Christian from Islamic societies."—Judith C.
Brown, author of Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in
Renaissance Italy

"Dursteler's book narrates the lives of early modern women who used
the religious, cultural, and political boundaries of the early modern
Mediterranean to shape the course of their own lives. Dursteler has
skillfully teased these women's stories from slender archival evidence
and has elegantly placed their experiences in a wider context. These
fascinating stories are a wonderful introduction to the way gender,
religion, and geography intersected in the eastern Mediterranean, and
the book will work particularly well in the classroom as a way to
begin discussions of the malleability of religious and gender
identities in the early modern world."—Monique O'Connell, author of
Men of Empire: Power and Negotiation in Venice's Maritime State

Eric R Dursteler is a professor of history at Brigham Young University
and the author of Venetians in Constantinople, also published by Johns
Hopkins.