The Anti‐Essentialist Choice: Nationalism and Feminism in the Interaction between Two Women's Projects

Abstract. Two cross‐national women's organisations, one in Northern Ireland the other in Bosnia‐Herzegovina, are observed here in interaction with each other. The article explores the connection between their ability to sustain such cross‐community alliances and their choice to be women's projects. In so doing, it addresses the question ‘are feminism and nationalism compatible?’ Not all the women are ‘anti‐nationalist’ in philosophy, but they draw distinctions between variants of nationalism, and may be described as ‘anti‐essentialist’. The article distinguishes between variants of ‘feminism’, recognising it, too, as a plurality of movements. An anti‐essentialist understanding of ethnicity and nation is partnered in both the Network and Medica by an anti‐essentialist feminism, in which a woman's family role is minimised and value placed instead on her autonomy and agency. Certain forms of feminism and nationalism are thus compatible – but the configuration may be progressive or retrograde.     

Theological Innovation from Spiritual Experience: Henry Alline's Anti‐Calvinism in Late Eighteenth‐Century Nova Scotia and New England*

The strident anti‐Calvinism of Nova Scotian revivalist Henry Alline (1748–1784), who left a substantial mark on the religious landscape of Nova Scotia and parts of New England, has been noted but largely neglected by historians. This article investigates Alline's anti‐Calvinism and concludes that it is best explained as arising from his own interpretation of his vivid spiritual experiences, particularly his dramatic conversion. Rather than simply rejecting Calvinist theology in favour of an emotive, experiential religion, however, Alline drew on his experiences to formulate an alternative anti‐Calvinist theology. Alongside other examples from the period, Alline's case suggests that evangelical “democratization” of popular religion in the eighteenth‐century transatlantic revivals could result in theological innovation rather than the abandonment of theology.     

Misogyny,Jest‐Books and Male Youth Culture in Seventeenth‐Century England

Over the past twenty years, patriarchy has become a vitally important analytical concept for historians of women, gender and masculinity. By contrast, misogyny has been under‐explored, despite being an equally prevalent historical phenomenon. This article offers a cultural history of seventeenth‐century masculinity based on an analysis of the humorous jokes and stories found in jest‐books, a genre that appealed in particular to male adolescents and young men in their twenties. It argues that patriarchy and misogyny should be treated as separate analytical concepts and cultural phenomena that appealed to different sorts of men. While patriarchy offered a code of manly behaviour for middling‐sort married males to aspire to, misogynistic humour appealed predominantly to youthful single males, who were as antagonistic towards patriarchs as they were towards women. In articulating such an argument, this article engages with debates about manhood, misogyny and the reception and creation of everyday culture in early modern society.     

Ladies who Lounge: Class,Religion and Social Interaction in Seventeenth‐Century Isfahan

Western society appears inordinately keen on outdated and stereotypical tropes of Islamic architecture, talking of a ‘hidden world’ of Islam in which women are seen and not heard as they live their lives incarcerated in the harem. This trope of Western Orientalism has become entrenched in our culture through travel accounts, the writings of historical voyeurs such as Sir Richard Burton and the romantic/erotic imagery of nineteenth‐century Orientalist painters. This paper aims to dispel many of the preconceptions that are held regarding the Iranian harem and the role of women in Safavid society by addressing the status of elite Iranian women, but also placing them in the wider context and considering the evidence for lower‐class women who could simply not afford to live a cloistered life. There is also the case of non‐Muslim women whose religions forbade polygamy and who were therefore immediately placed outside the harem and, although Safavid Iran included significant numbers of Zoroastrians and Jews as well a handful of Hindus, this paper will concentrate on one particular religious minority; the Caucasian Christians who were such an integral part of Abbas’ great project that they were awarded a particular status in the city of Isfahan.     

Reading the Body: Mystical Theology and Spiritual Actualisation in Early Seventeenth‐Century Lima*

In early seventeenth‐century Lima, Peru, female visionaries composed texts of their bodies, and texts composed their bodies. This fact can be explained, in part, by the belief that an individual could gain access to and appropriate the language of God (His spiritus) in distinct ways. Mystical narratives, stigmata, as well as the spoken words of enraptured visionaries communicating with absent souls were considered readable texts because the object to be read could be a book, a painting, or the body itself. Thus the reading of, and listening to, texts was parallel to Lima's visionaries entering a state of spiritual ecstasy (arrobamiento), and “reading” their bodies as living books, which perforce became a readable space.     

The Gender of Grace: Impotence,Servitude, and Manliness in the Fifth‐Century West

This essay attempts to stage an encounter between post‐Foucauldian approaches to masculinity in the ancient world on the one hand, and the reading of Augustine of Hippo's idea of Original Sin as a disjunction of the will, put forward in Robert Markus's Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of Saint Augustine. Emphasis is placed on Book XIV of the City of God, where Augustine emblematises the result of Original Sin not –pace Foucault – through an image of irrepressible lust, but rather through that of the impotent male, humiliated by his inability to embody his desire.     

Manliness,Male Virtue and History Writing at the Seventeenth‐Century Ottoman Court

When one compares Ottoman chronicles written in the wake of the failed Vienna campaign of 1683 to those composed prior to 1682 and finally to those completed in 1658 one finds, first, that gendered conceptions were central to the authors' depictions of the era and, second, that the model of manliness and male virtue that the authors conceived changed greatly. To authors writing during the first decade of Mehmed IV's reign (1648–58), male virtue was expressed in self‐mastery, the mastery of subordinates, particularly women, and the control of financial resources. Authors in the period between 1658 and 1682 imagined manliness in terms of bravery – manifested in hunting and waging war, labelled interchangeably ghaza or jihad – and Islamic zeal. After 1682, writers again returned to an understanding of male virtue and manliness centred on self‐control. This article explains the reasons for this change in conceptions of manliness and male virtue by relating it to the dynamic competition between courtly factions patronising literary production. The need to curry favour with these factions was reflected in the writers' choice of literary genre, which intervened discursively to offer different images of the sultan and valide sultan (queen mother).     

Extraordinary Satisfactions: Lesbian Visibility in Seventeenth–Century Pornography in England

This article analyses seventeenth–century pornographic literature and popular ballads to explore alternative representations, and hence interpretations, of female same–sex desire than those presented by either early modern legal, medical and religious discourse in which the image of the tribade predominates, or the homoerotic prose and poetry of female writers. It argues that early modern culture was not limited to interpreting sexual acts between women as the result of either a physical abnormality (clitoral hypertrophy) or the desire to live as a man, and thence to take on his sexual as well as social role.     

The Book of Marriage: Histories of Muslim Women in Twentieth‐Century Australia

From 1860 to the 1920s, Muslim merchants and workers from across British India and Afghanistan travelled to Australian shores to work in the extensive camel transportation network that underpinned the growth of capitalism in the Australian interior. Through marriage, South Asian women in addition to white women and Aboriginal women became part of families spanning the Indian Ocean. Yet, the life‐worlds of these women are absent from Australian historiography and the field of Indian Ocean studies alike. When women do appear in Australian histories of Muslim communities, the orientalist accounts work to condemn Muslim men rather than shed light on women's lives. Leading scholars of Indian Ocean mobilities on the other hand, have tended to equate masculinity with motion and femininity with stasis, omitting analyses of women's life‐trajectories across the Indian Ocean arena. In this article, I rethink the definitions of ‘motion’ that underpin Indian Ocean histories by reading marriage records as an archive of women's motion. Using family archives spanning from Australia to South Asia, this article examines five women's marriages to South Asian men in Australia. Challenging the racist accounts of gender relations that currently structure histories of Muslims in Australia, I turn to the intellectual traditions of colonised peoples in search of alternatives to orientalist narratives. Redeploying the Muslim narrative tradition of Kitab al‐Nikah (Book of Marriage) to write feminist history, this article proposes a new framework to house histories of Muslim women.