Between Dung and Blood: Purity, Sainthood, and Power in the Early Modern Western Mediterranean (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780520421035)

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 Christian and Islamic territory could, at times, be porous and conducive to shared conceptions.

Author: Manuela Ceballos
ISBN-10: 0520421035
ISBN-13: 9780520421035
Publisher: University of California Press
Language: English
Published: 12/30/2025
Pages: 272
Format: Hardcover