Women in the Ottoman Balkans

Gender, Culture and History

Amila Buturovic, Irvin Cemil Schick

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN:
  9781845115050
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857717986
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Baltic History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1. Eastern Concubines, Western Mistresses: Prevost's 'Histoire d'une Grecque moderne'
• 2. Persecution and Perfidy: Women's and Men's Worldviews in Pontic Greek Folktales
• 3. Love and/or Death? Women and Conflict Resolution in the Traditional Bosnian Ballad
• 4. Women Founders of Pious Endowments in Ottoman Bosnia
• 5. Jewish Tobacco Workers in Salonika: Gender and Family in the Context of Social and Ethnic Strife
• 6. Judicial Treatment of the Matrimonial Problems of Christian Women in Rumeli During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
• 7. Women, Fashion, and Europeanization: The Romanian Principalities, 1750-1830
• 8. The Role of Women in Southeast European Vampire Belief
• 9. Christian Women in an Ottoman World: Interpersonal and Family Cases Brought Before the Shari'a Courts During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
• 10. Christian Maidens, Turkish Ravishers: The Sexualization of National Conflict in the Late Ottoman Period
• 11. Women in Ottoman Bosnia as Seen Through the Eyes of Luka Botic, a Christian Poet
• 12. MIssing Husbands, Waiting Wives, Bosnian Mufits: Fatwa Texts and the Interpretation of Gendered Presences and Absences in Late Ottoman Bosnia
• List of Contributors
• Index