Jewish Women's History from Antiquity to the Present is broad in geographical scope exploring Jewish women's lives in what is now Eastern and Western Europe, Britain, Israel, Turkey, North Africa, and North America. Editors Federica Francesconi and Rebecca Lynn Winer focus the volume on reconstructing the experiences of ordinary women and situating those of the extraordinary and famous within the gender systems of their times and places. The twenty-one contributors analyze the history of Jewish women in the light of gender as religious, cultural, and social construct. They apply new methodologies in approaching rabbinic sources, prescriptive literature, and musar (ethics), interrogating them about female roles in the biblical and rabbinic imaginations, and in relation to women's restrictions and quotidian actions on the ground. They explore Jewish's women experiences of persecution, displacement, immigration, integration, and social mobility from the medieval age through the nineteenth century. And for the modern era, this volume assesses women's spiritual developments; how they experienced changes in religious and political societies, both Jewish and non-Jewish; the history of women in the Holocaust, their struggle through persecution and deportation; women's everyday concerns, Jewish lesbian activism, and the spiritual sphere in the contemporary era. Contributors reinterpret rabbinical responsa through new lenses and study a plethora of unpublished and previously unknown archival sources, such as community ordinances and court records, alongside autobiographies, letters, poetry, narrative prose, devotional objects, the built environment, illuminated manuscripts, and early printed books. This publication is significant within the field of Jewish studies and beyond; the essays include comparative material and have the potential to reach scholarly audiences in many related fields but are also written to be accessible to all, with the introductions in every chapter aimed at orienting the enthusiast from outside academia to each time and place.

Women, Wealth, and Community in Perpignan, c. 1250-1300 investigates the gender system at work in medieval Perpignan. Using a series of notarial registers - unique as surviving records for the social history of the thirteenth-century realms of Aragon and Majorca, the political confederations to which this town belonged - Rebecca L. Winer opens a window onto the experiences of women and their families. Her interpretive framework reveals medieval assumptions about the distinct natures of Christian, Jewish, and enslaved Muslim women by analyzing which actions were curbed, controlled, or fostered in these different groups. Sensitive to questions of social rank and marital status, the book departs from traditional women's history by asking how a woman's religious identity factored in determining her economic and legal options in this society. As a frontier town, Perpignan lends itself well to an analysis of relations among Christians, Jews and Muslim slaves. The later thirteenth century also provides an ideal focus for this inquiry since the politics of Christian expansion and the economics of the western Mediterranean meant that Jewish communities flourished. In contrast, Christian/Muslim relations unfolded particularly tensely due to intermittent conflict and both groups' slave trade almost exclusively in each other's people. Winer reconstructs how the members of these three communities negotiated shared space, conducting all manner of exchanges, making (endogamous) marriages, wills, commercial contracts, and arranging for the care of children whose fathers were lost to war or disease. The first section of the book focuses on women's legal status, work and control of financial resources in the two dominant communities, Christian and Jewish, across the social spectrum. It goes on to compare the ways in which mothers' relationships to their children were understood in the Christian and Jewish communities. The book concludes by entering the homes of Christian

Women, Wealth, and Community in Perpignan, c. 1250-1300 investigates the gender system at work in medieval Perpignan. Using a series of notarial registers - unique as surviving records for the social history of the thirteenth-century realms of Aragon and Majorca, the political confederations to which this town belonged - Rebecca L. Winer opens a window onto the experiences of women and their families. Her interpretive framework reveals medieval assumptions about the distinct natures of Christian, Jewish, and enslaved Muslim women by analyzing which actions were curbed, controlled, or fostered in these different groups. Sensitive to questions of social rank and marital status, the book departs from traditional women's history by asking how a woman's religious identity factored in determining her economic and legal options in this society. As a frontier town, Perpignan lends itself well to an analysis of relations among Christians, Jews, and Muslim slaves. The later thirteenth century also provides an ideal focus for this inquiry since the politics of Christian expansion and the economics of the western Mediterranean meant that Jewish communities flourished. intermittent conflict and both groups' slave trade almost exclusively in each other's people. Winer reconstructs how the members of these three communities negotiated shared space, conducting all manner of exchanges, making (endogamous) marriages, wills, commercial contracts, and arranging for the care of children whose fathers were lost to war or disease. The first section of the book focuses on women's legal status, work and control of financial resources in the two dominant communities, Christian and Jewish, across the social spectrum. It goes on to compare the ways in which mothers' relationships to their children were understood in the Christian and Jewish communities. The book concludes by entering the homes of Christian and Jewish masters to reveal the multi-faceted positions of Muslim and newly baptized slave women, whose oppression completes the picture of the gender hierarchy in Perpignan. With its analysis of how class, gender, and religious difference shaped everyday practice, Women, Wealth, and Community in Perpignan, c. relations and medieval studies.

Jewish Women's History from Antiquity to the Present is broad in geographical scope exploring Jewish women's lives in what is now Eastern and Western Europe, Britain, Israel, Turkey, North Africa, and North America. Editors Federica Francesconi and Rebecca Lynn Winer focus the volume on reconstructing the experiences of ordinary women and situating those of the extraordinary and famous within the gender systems of their times and places. The twenty-one contributors analyze the history of Jewish women in the light of gender as religious, cultural, and social construct. They apply new methodologies in approaching rabbinic sources, prescriptive literature, and musar (ethics), interrogating them about female roles in the biblical and rabbinic imaginations, and in relation to women's restrictions and quotidian actions on the ground. They explore Jewish's women experiences of persecution, displacement, immigration, integration, and social mobility from the medieval age through the nineteenth century. And for the modern era, this volume assesses women's spiritual developments; how they experienced changes in religious and political societies, both Jewish and non-Jewish; the history of women in the Holocaust, their struggle through persecution and deportation; women's everyday concerns, Jewish lesbian activism, and the spiritual sphere in the contemporary era. Contributors reinterpret rabbinical responsa through new lenses and study a plethora of unpublished and previously unknown archival sources, such as community ordinances and court records, alongside autobiographies, letters, poetry, narrative prose, devotional objects, the built environment, illuminated manuscripts, and early printed books. This publication is significant within the field of Jewish studies and beyond; the essays include comparative material and have the potential to reach scholarly audiences in many related fields but are also written to be accessible to all, with the introductions in every chapter aimed at orienting the enthusiast from outside academia to each time and place.