Gender, Conversion, and Boundaries in the Early Modern Mediterranean

FAIN: FA-52186-06

Eric R. Dursteler
Brigham Young University (Provo, UT 84602)

In recent years scholars have been drawn to the fascinating and little studied experience of the renegades, Christians who embraced Islam and in doing so crossed perhaps the most elemental and significant of all early modern boundaries: that of religion. . . . To this point, however, the bulk of this work has focused almost entirely on the experiences of renegade men: women, who crossed religious frontiers in lesser, but not insignificant numbers, have been generally ignored. . . . I have been fortunate to identify a number of cases of women who passed from Christianity to Islam (or in the opposite direction), and never returned to their birth religions. . . . The richness of [relevant] documentary sources has allowed me to develop three detailed narratives of women who crossed early modern religious boundaries.