Religion, Gender, and Culture in the Pre-Modern World

289 Pages·2007·4.618 MB·English

by  Alexandra Cuffel, Brian Britt (eds.)

RELIGION, GENDER,ANDCULTUREINTHE
PRE-MODERNWORLD
Religion/Culture/Critique
Series editor: Elizabeth A. Castelli
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Religion, Gender, and Culture in the Pre-Modern World
Edited by Alexandra Cuffel and Brian Britt
(2007)
R , G , C
ELIGION ENDER AND ULTURE
P -M W
IN THE RE ODERN ORLD
EDITEDBY
ALEXANDRA CUFFEL AND BRIAN BRITT
RELIGION,GENDER,ANDCULTUREINTHEPRE-MODERNWORLD
© Alexandra Cuffel and Brian Britt,2007.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978-1-4039-7218-7
All rights reserved.No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published in 2007 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-53347-3 ISBN 978-0-230-60429-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230604292
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Religion,gender,and culture in the pre-modern world / edited by
Alexandra Cuffel and Brian Britt.
p.cm.—(Religion / culture / critique)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1.Gender identity—History.2.Sex differences—History.
3.Anthropology of religion.4.Ethnic relations—History.I.Cuffel,
Alexandra.II.Britt,Brian M.,1964–
HQ2I.R427 2007
306.7089—dc22 2006049108
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd.,Chennai,India.
First edition:March 2007
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Alexandra Cuffel and Brian Britt
I Ancient Cultures
1 Ethnic Curses as “Last Resort of
the Weak” in Genesis 9:18–28 and Joshua 9:22–27 25
Brian Britt
2 Promiscuous or Proper? Nymphs as Female
Role Models in Ancient Greece 47
Ann-Marie Knoblauch
3 Hercules in a Skirt, or the Feminization of Victory
during the Roman Civil Wars and Early Empire 63
Carlin Barton
II Medieval Cultures
4 “The Sweepings of Lamia”: Transformations of
the Myths of Lilith and Lamia 77
Irven M. Resnick and Kenneth F. Kitchell Jr.
5 Cross-Dressing and Female Same-Sex Marriage
in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures 105
Sahar Amer
6 Reorienting Christian “Amazons”: Women
Warriors in Medieval Islamic Literature in the Context
of the Crusades 137
Alexandra Cuffel
vi Contents
7 Hunters and Boundaries in Mande Cultures 167
Stephen Belcher
III Early Modern Cultures
8 Peripheral Inclusion: Communal Belonging in Suriname’s
Sephardic Community 185
Aviva Ben-Ur
9 The Vain, Exotic, and Erotic Feather: Dress, Gender, and
Power in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England 211
Catherine Howey
10 S(m)oothing the Savage(’s) B(r)east: Covering and
Colonialism in the Age of Euro-American Expansion 241
Adam Knobler
11 European Family Law and the People of the Frontier 251
James Muldoon
Contributors 265
Index 269
Acknowledgments
This book began as a series of lectures in 2001 and 2002 sponsored by the
Dean of Arts and Sciences at Virginia Tech. We would like to thank Dean
Robert Bates and the Departments of History and Interdisciplinary Studies
for supporting the series, and Paulette Jayabalan for designing and organizing
the publicity. We would also like to thank Allison Martin for her skillful and
prompt work in editing and help in preparing the manuscript. Sahar Amer,
Rosamond Rodman, and Adam Knobler made helpful comments on the
Introduction, though fault for any shortcomings lies with us. Additional
thanks go to Elizabeth Castelli, who encouraged us to pursue this project,
along with Amanda Johnson, Herta Pitman, and Emily Leithauser at
Palgrave, for their enthusiasm, support, and patience. Finally, we wish to
thank each other and the contributors for the rewarding experience of
collaboration on this volume.
Introduction
Alexandra Cuffel and Brian Britt
Differences of identity are marked in multiple ways and thus must be studied
inmultiple ways. The use of certain categories of gender or ethnicity for the
study of pre-modern cultures may be anachronistic, but as a provisional
strategy, it may produce significant new insights. By collecting essays from
historians, art historians, and scholars of literature and religion on a variety
of pre-modern texts, this volume demonstrates how interdisciplinary
approaches to several kinds of difference create new understandings of
pre-modern constructions of difference.
Religion, Gender, and Culture in the Pre-Modern Worldcompares shifting
formulations of gender, interreligious and ethnic relations in the Near East,
Europe, the Americas, and Africa from antiquity to the nineteenth century.
This book addresses two fundamental questions that face scholars of
pre-modern cultures. First, to what extent can contemporary identity categories
of gender, ethnicity, and religion adequately address pre-modern contexts?
Second, how will focused studies of pre-modern religious and gender dif-
ference relate to such widely used categories and theories? To address these
questions this collection encompasses four areas in pre-modern history,
literature, and religion: sexual identities and behaviors, especially same-sex
love and cross-dressing; women and the embodied conceptualizations of
“femininity” and “masculinity”; the role of sexuality, marriage, and gender
in expressions of religious and ethnic difference; and how contacts between
diverse peoples related to hybrid identities and new group boundaries. The
essays collected here demonstrate close intersections of religious, ethnic,
and gendered identities and show how these categories came to be worked
out upon the body and its adornment. In diverse, culturally specific
examples, these essays suggest that the body, especially its capacity for sexu-
ality, often provided the basis or metaphor for boundaries between groups
and was the focus of group anxieties about identity.
Diverse perspectives sharpen the concepts and methods of study. As
essays by Sahar Amer, Brian Britt, Alexandra Cuffel, Adam Knobler, and
2 Alexandra Cuffel and Brian Britt
Irven Resnick and Kenneth Kitchell show, differences of gender and sexuality
often relate directly to ethnic and religious differences. Yet constructing,
maintaining, and crossing boundaries of difference take place in specific
contexts of discourse and culture. Like Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric as
the use of available means of persuasion, discourses of identity difference
depend on these particular circumstances. Religion, ethnicity, and gender,
the perennial markers of identity difference, are used to perform similar
kinds of cultural work. Rigorous studies of pre-modern difference might lie
not within particular comparisons of gender or religious difference but, par-
adoxically, across them. In other words, meaningful comparisons may not
be found at the conceptual level of notions of gender or ethnicity but at the
level of how communities seize upon categories of difference at hand.
Byexamining the cultural work of difference that various specific but disparate
communities sought to accomplish, we hope that this collection will encourage
other scholars to explore the intersections of gender, religion, and ethnicity
across multiple cultures and to reflect on the similarities and differences that
such comparisons reveal in their own theorizations of “otherness.”
The book is divided into three main chronological sections: ancient,
medieval, and early modern. The first section on ancient cultures contains
three chapters, one on ancient Israelite curses against Canaanites and
Gibeonites within the context of fears about intermarriage; the second deal-
ing with the meanings of the contradictory literary and artistic depictions of
nymphs in ancient Greece as simultaneously demure and sexually lascivious;
and the third focusing on the mockery of old ideas of Roman masculinity
and the conscious adoption of women’s dress as part of the victorious
warrior’s identity.
Four chapters comprise the section on the Middle Ages: one exploring
European Christian transformations of the legends of the female demon-
beast, Lamia, as a way of polemicizing against Jews and heretics as simulta-
neously bestial and feminine; a second examining same-sex love between
women in parallel examples from medieval French and Arabic literature; a
third analyzing conversion and sexual reorientation versus death of
Christian warrior women in Muslim and Arabic epics; and a fourth on the
role of the hunter as a bridge between not only the natural animal world
and humans, but also between men and women in the epic traditions of
Mali and Guinea.
The final section on the early modern period begins with an examination
of conversion and intermarriage between Sephardi Jews and Africans in
Suriname despite Spanish and Portuguese legislation against miscegenation
from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. The second looks at the
transformation of the feather as an article of male clothing to one belonging
to female attire, and the ways in which conflicts surrounding “feathered