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Eric Dursteler , Renegade Women: Gender, Identity and Boundaries in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore, Md. : John Hopkins University Press , 2011). Pp. 240. $55 cloth, $25 paper.
Gender and Social History
Eric Drustler's Renegade Women is a masterfully composed collection of microhistories that focus on Ottoman and Venetian women who transgressed imperial, geographical, and confessional borders during a period of political stability between the Ottoman and Venetian empires, from the late 16th century until the outbreak of the Candian war in 1645. In early modern Mediterranean vocabulary, the signifier "renegade" denoted a Christian (man or woman) who "rebelled against the faith" and abandoned Christianity to embrace Islam. In Renegade Women, however, Dursteler redefines and expands the semantic field of the term "renegade" to include not only Christian women who converted to Islam but also all women who transgressed gender, social, political, and religious boundaries, and "in any geographical, ideological, or theological direction" (p. ix).
Dursteler makes the Mediterranean a prominent character in each of the collection's tales. In conceptualizing the Mediterranean as "a channel of division, a corridor of an escape, and a means of connection" (p. x), Dursteler provides his female protagonists with a topos that is conducive to interconnectivity and delineation, stability and transformation. Dursteler's casting of the Mediterranean as "an arena of interactions, of encounters and exchanges" (p. 108), creates the necessary backdrop to the tales of reconfiguration of the boundaries of religious identities and territorial belongings, which, as Dursteler convincingly argues, were fragmented, fuzzy, and open to contextual recreation and reimagination.
The tales of Renegade Women are presented across three chapters, followed by a conclusion in which the author recapitulates and further substantiates some of the book's arguments. In the first chapter, Dursteler tells the story of Beatrice Michiel of Venice who was living in an unhappy marriage with her second husband, a merchant without citizenship named Zuane Zaghis. With little...