Renegade Women: Gender, Identity, and Boundaries in the Early Modern Mediterranean

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...

You might also like:

• The Great Sea:A Human History of the Mediterranean
• Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity, and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean (The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science)