Between Dung and Blood: Ritual Purity, Sainthood, and Power in the Early Modern Mediterranean

FAIN: FEL-288468-23

Manuela Ceballos
University of Tennessee, Knoxville (Knoxville, TN 37916-3801)

Research and writing leading to a comparative history of Spanish Catholic Saint Teresa de Ávila (d. 1582) and Moroccan Sufi Sidi Ri?wan al-Januwi (d. 1583).

"Between Dung and Blood: Ritual Purity, Sainthood, and Power in the Early Modern Mediterranean" employs sources in Arabic and Spanish to investigate how the stories of two sixteenth-century saints, both from families of converts, reveal the roles played by blood and bodily pollution as substances and symbols in the religious and political fabric of the early modern Western Mediterranean. I argue that, in Morocco and Iberia, ideas about blood and bodily pollution helped shape processes of race-making and social hierarchies based on notions of ritual purity and impurity.