Women in the Ottoman Empire: Middle Eastern Women in the Early Modern Era

Women in the Ottoman Empire: Middle Eastern Women in the Early Modern Era. Edited by MADELINE C. ZILFI. The Ottoman Empire and its Heritage: Politics, Society and Economy, vol. 10. Leiden: E. J. BRILL, 1997. Pp. xi + 333, 4 illustrations. $96.25.

This volume collects papers originally presented at the conference "Women in the Ottoman Empire: History and Legacy of the Early Modern Middle East, 1650-1830," held at the University of Maryland in 1994. As a field, Middle East history has lagged behind other disciples in studying women's history. Furthermore, the work that has been done has tended to focus temporally on the early-Islamic era or the twentieth century, and linguistically on Arabic or Persian sources. This collection of papers helps to fill the resulting historiographic gap by investigating women in the Ottoman period.

According to the editor, these studies all proceed from the same premises (p. vii). The first is that the unique documentation of the Ottoman period can be used to explore the complex conditions of women. Indeed, many of the papers draw on the same types of documents, most notably Ottoman...