When Beruriah Met Aisha

Textual Intersections & Interactions among Jewish and Muslim Women Engaged with Religious Law

Abstract

My dissertation attends to the complex and very fraught relationship that women have with their sacred scriptures by examining overlapping conceptions of religious law and legal reform among Jewish and Muslim women who actively study and interpret traditional texts. My project hopes to address what it is that animates Muslim and Jewish women’s interests in textual studies and how close engagement with religious legal texts might contribute to their development as particularized religious subjects.