Between Dung and Blood: Purity, Sainthood, and Power in the Early Modern Western Mediterranean - Hardcover

by Manuela Ceballos (Author)

Between Dung and Blood investigates the stories of two sixteenth-century saints: the Spanish Christian Teresa de Jesús and the Moroccan Sufi Sīdī Riḍwān al-Januwī, both from families of converts. Through the stories of these saints, Manuela Ceballos reveals the roles played by blood and bodily pollution as substances and symbols in the religious and political fabric of the early modern Western Mediterranean. Drawing primarily on Arabic and Spanish sources, the author argues that in Morocco and Iberia, ideas about blood and bodily pollution helped shape processes of bodily differentiation as well as social hierarchies based on notions of ritual purity and impurity. Providing an inside look at the dynamics within Moroccan and Iberian societies as they grappled with the social and religious upheaval of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Ceballos shows that the real and imagined border between geographies and religious traditions could, at times, be porous and conducive to shared beliefs.

Back Jacket

Manuela Ceballos retells the stories of the sixteenth-century saints Teresa of ?vila and Sīdī Riḍwān al-Januwī with incredible insight, exceptional linguistic skill, and a refreshingly comparative approach. The two saints' contemporary but independent narrative traditions reveal how Christians and Muslims, respectively, reimagined religious identity following the demise of interreligious cohabitation in Iberia.--Jocelyn Hendrickson, author of Leaving Iberia: Islamic Law and Christian Conquest in North West Africa

"Intertwining the histories of two converts--a Christian convert to Islam and Jewish convert to Christianity--Ceballos elegantly traces the polysemous qualities of blood in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions as they come to shape and inform modern ideas about race and inheritance. One cannot call this work merely comparative or interdisciplinary without doing injustice to its sophisticated methods and aims."--Hussein Fancy, Associate Professor of History, Yale University

"Ceballos's parallel analysis of a Muslim Sufi and a Christian saint is a stirring interdisciplinary accomplishment. Scholars of religion and Mediterranean studies owe themselves the delight of reading it."--Thomas E. Burman, author of Reading the Qurʾan in Latin Christendom, 1140-1560

Author Biography

Manuela Ceballos is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.