Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Women in the Ottoman Balkans were founders of pious endowments, organizers of labour and conspicuous consumers of western luxury goods; they were lovers, wives, castaways, divorcees, widows, the subjects of ballads and the narrators of folk tales, victims of communal oppression and protectors of their communities against supernatural forces. In their daily lives, they experienced oppression and self-denial in the face of frequently unsympathetic local customs, but also empowerment, self-affirmation, and acculturation. This volume not only deepens our understanding of the distinctive contributions that women have made to Balkan history but also re-evaluates this through a more inclusive and interdisciplinary analysis in which gender takes its place alongside other categories such as class, culture, religion, ethnicity and nationhood. This original and stimulating examination of the lives of Muslim, Christian and Jewish women in southeastern Europe during the centuries of Ottoman rule focuses especially on those social relations that crossed ethnic and confessional intercommunal boundaries.

Reviews

"most interesting..a very welcome contribution to a little known subject" - Suraiya Faroqhi, Professor of Ottoman Studies at the Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich and author ofThe Ottoman Empire and the World Around It

Author Bio

Irvin C. Schick has taught at Harvard University and MIT, where he is currently a researcher. He is the author of The Erotic Margin: Sexuality and Spatiality in Alteritist Discourse and The Fair Circassian: Adventures of an Orientalist Motif. Amila Buturovic is Associate Professor at York University, Toronto and author of Stone Speakers: Medieval Tombs, Landscape, and Nationhood in the Poetry of Mak Dizdar.