Of Ladies and Lesbians and Books on Women from the Third/Ninth and Fourth/Tenth Centuries
Information about women in Abbasid society — and especially the subgroups of mutaẓarrifāt, ladies, and saḥḥaqāt, lesbians — is gathered from two extant sources that explicitly deal with the subject: al-Muwashshā, “The Painted Cloth,” by al-Washshāʾ (d. 325/936-7) and Jawāmiʿ al-ladhdha, composed som...
| Published in: | Journal of Abbasid Studies |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Brill
2017
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| In: |
Journal of Abbasid Studies
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| Further subjects: | B
Abbasid culture
homosexuality
refinement
saḥq
slave-girls
ẓarīf
|
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Verlag) |
| Summary: | Information about women in Abbasid society — and especially the subgroups of mutaẓarrifāt, ladies, and saḥḥaqāt, lesbians — is gathered from two extant sources that explicitly deal with the subject: al-Muwashshā, “The Painted Cloth,” by al-Washshāʾ (d. 325/936-7) and Jawāmiʿ al-ladhdha, composed some fifty years later by ʿAlī b. Naṣr al-Kātib. The Jawāmiʿ al-ladhdha is an erotic compendium that relies heavily on earlier sources, al-Muwashshā included; however, most of the works cited are lost. A survey of book-titles from the same period indicates that a good many books about women were written at the time. Representations of ladies and lesbians as they appear from the two sources and surveyed lists of book-titles suggest a complex picture of the lady-lesbian that changed over time. That some of the books dealing with the subject were still available some six-hundred years later shows that the erotic lore of the Abbasids continued to arouse interest for centuries. |
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| ISSN: | 2214-2371 |
| Contains: | In: Journal of Abbasid Studies
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1163/22142371-12340033 |