In this article I examini two problems regarding women's participation in shared saint veneration and festivals in the eastern Mediterranean and Iberia. First, I ascertain what women's practices were, whether women participated in or assigned meanings to rituals that were separate from those of men, and finally, whether these shared practices were enough to break down religious barriers between women so that we may speak of ‘women's piety’ or ‘women's religious culture’ as a category that extends beyond the confines of individual religious affiliations. Secondly, I explore the meanings that certain male writers assigned in these practices and their emphasis on the fact that it was women, according to them, who engaged in the rituals. I show that, in contrast to Christian or Jewish authors, many Muslim legalists focused on women as the primary participants in certain types of piety as a polemical strategy to denigrate religious practices of which they disapproved.

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Abd al-Malik ibn abīb, a ninth-century writer from Muslim Spain, warned women: "Flee the ammām for it is one of the houses of heresy and one of the doors to fiery hell." 1 This rather pointed remark simultaneously associates ammāmāt (public baths) with heresy, or 'bad religion', or immorality, and designates women as the primary perpetrators or ones to be ensnared by this 'heresy' and immorality located within the ammāmāt. Both Muslim and, later, Christian men made these connections. I argue that for Muslim men, the ammām was a place where foreign, non-Muslim women mingled with Muslim ones, or where Muslim women could socialize freely with one another without male company. Both situations sparked anxiety among the Muslim men who attempted to direct or describe women's activities in the ammām. Early modern Christian travelers were similarly fascinated by the gyno-or androsociablity of the ammām; however, they associated women's and men's desire for baths and sexual misbehavior in them with the climatological affects on Middle Eastern peoples' physiology or with what was, in their eyes, 'strange' treatment of women by Muslims. This biologically oriented polemic was a new tactic rooted both in these older concerns extant in the Muslim world, and in the increased preoccupation with climate and sanitation in Early Modern Europe.

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