Women in the Twelfth-Century Levant
Abstract:
This project examined the Christian and Muslim women living in the Levant c. 1062-1189, with particular emphasis on the cross-cultural relationships in which they participated. The project is divided into three subtopics: the narrative disruption women caused by participating in the masculine enterprises of Crusade and jihad, the experiences of captured women in the Levant, and the eventual shift in the discourse cross-cultural relationships into a method of (imaginative) cultural containment. Taken together, they demonstrate that although women were a crucial part of the Crusade and jihad rhetoric, their actual experiences rarely aligned with the dominant narrative.