Female adolescence in the Cairo Geniza documents

This dissertation examines a brief stage in the early female life course among the lower to upper middle urban Jewish classes of the Fatimid and Ayyubid empires. Using evidence drawn from a broad range of primary texts (primarily published and unpublished documents preserved in the Cairo Geniza and contemporary responsa), I assess the legal, social, and cultural structures through which young women came of age between puberty and early marriage, focusing on the implications of my findings for family formation, the nature of women's social capital, and the social uses and effects of religious law.;Both puberty and first marriage acted as major organizing events in women's early lives. Physical puberty rendered girls socially marriageable, although many girls did not marry until several years later. Girls' liminal position during this adolescent interval inspired particular social anxiety, focused primarily on economic rather than social or sexual concerns. Adolescent girls could formally hold property and perform productive labor, but were nonetheless viewed as intrinsic economic dependents who (distinct from women at later stages of the life-cycle) required external support for their social protection. In contrast, women's freedom of movement differed not along age but along class lines, across a recognized social divide often enforced by women themselves, between girls and women of all ages who remained secluded in their homes, and those who circulated in the public sphere. Once betrothed, even secluded unmarried girls could experience close personal contact -- and in some cases sexual intimacy -- with their future husbands.;Marriage itself transformed women's effective economic capacity and reordered their social universe; decisions made in adolescence cast a long shadow over this transition. Families of different classes used their daughters' marriages as a form of social capital, which could be expended to diverse ends: to consolidate family property, and to both cement and extend their male relatives' effective social networks. Individual women consequently entered marriage under a range of circumstances - with widely divergent dowries, expected economic rights, and protective kinship ties, into varyingly composed households with very different role expectations - that decisively affected their experiences of marriage and their lifelong social and economic position.;Mapping this evidence against the norms articulated in both rabbinic and Islamic prescriptive legal discourse, I argue that it reflects a set of durable social structures and cultural ideas widespread throughout the medieval Near East, but which contrasted sharply with the technical forms of Rabbanite Jewish law. I examine how the Rabbanite Jews documented in the Geniza enacted this anomalous rabbinic tradition and negotiated it against their own cultural assumptions, as a case study for considering the complex social role of religious legal practice in the medieval eastern Mediterranean.