Part 1. Women in a patronage culture -- Chapter 1: The family -- Chapter 2: The courts and the law -- Part 2. Unmarried daughters -- Chapter 3: A ripened fig: age at first marriage -- Chapter 4: The economics of female adolescence -- Chapter 5: A virgin in her father's house: modesty, mobility, and social control -- Part 3. Becoming a wife -- Chapter 6: Marriage choices -- Chapter 7: Defining marriage: legal agreements and their uses -- Chapter 8: In the marital household
Summary
This book is based on documents preserved in the Cairo Geniza, which are written in three languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Judeo-Arabic (Arabic in Hebrew script)-as well as on late ancient and medieval literary texts in these languages. This book considers how ordinary Jewish women fit into the social order of the tenth to thirteenth century Islamic Eastern Mediterranean, both as women and as Jews, and how two institutions central to that social order-kinship and law-shaped their lives
