From practice to polemic: shared saints and festivals as ‘women's religion’ in the medieval Mediterranean

Abstract

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.

Agency and the roles of Southern Jordanian Bedouin women on pilgrimage and visiting holy sites

“…This gave me an opportunity to observe and interview local workers, visitors and pilgrims on the mountain during my stay. In 2002In , 2005 I surveyed several holy sites in Southern Jordan, collecting both ethnographic material about the traditions and beliefs, and documenting the material structures of the sites. In the course of this work, I lived for five months with a Bedouin family in 2005, with frequent shorter visits in the years following, remaining involved with the archaeological project until 2008.…”

“…Subsequently, I will analyse the role of women and their agency on public and private pilgrimages, comparing the practices found here with other regions of the Islamic world (Abu Lughod 1990;Andezian 1997;Cuffel 2005;Hegland 2003;Greenberg 2007;Mernissi 1977), but also paying attention to tempor al changes in the structure. I present the pilgrimage to Jabal Harun and other local sites as a tradition deeply embedded in the identity and religious culture of the region, yet at the same time embedded in trans national structures and affected by global fluctuations.…”

The Ritual Year of the Icon of the Annunciation on the Island of Tinos, Greece

“…5), illustrate two women's shrines in Bethlehem. There are several shared saints and festivals in the area (Cuffel 2005(Cuffel , 2009.…”

“A Desora Desperto y vio una Grand Claridat”: The Role of Dreams and Light in the Construction of a Multi-Confessional Audience of the Miracles of the Virgin of Guadalupe

“…Likewise, Francisco Prado-Vilar has explored the evidences of religious accommodation in the representation of the Virgin in the tales of Marian conversion (Prado-Vilar 2005). Similarly, my research follows the work of Alexandra Cuffel, who has pointed out the symbolic relationship of the Peninsula and the Maghreb in these stories and their instrumentalization of shared cults in the former al-Andalus and North Africa (Cuffel 2003(Cuffel , 2005. This paper also interrogates the relationship between the production of the Extremaduran Marian miracle collection and the emergence between the 14th and the 15th centuries of a Castilian devotional literature equally shaped by European devotional trends, religious polemic, and contacts with the Castilian Muslim population.…”