Suraiya Faroqhi

I feel that 3* is generous. It is probably unreasonable to try to encompass the experience of women over 500 years in an empire that stretched over large areas in Asia, Europe and Africa, with populations following various forms of Islam, Christianity and Judaism, speaking Turkish, Arabic, Greek Armenian, Bulgarian Ladino... in a work with only 200 pages of text. It gets even harder when the repeated and repeated complaints that there really aren't a lot of sources, and that what sources show more there are deal mostly with royal women, elite women, and only very rarely with even the well to do. There are lots of interesting tidbits here and there about various individuals, but no sense of any overarching conclusions except that the women involved had very different experiences. Several perhaps interesting individuals are merely mentioned without the stories gone into.

I suppose the repetitions of the lack of material were necessary. Without them the author might have struggled to find even 100 pages of text. show less

A collection of 13 scholarly essays by 12 authors. Covers from 15th thru 20th centuries. Information comes from estate inventories, analyses of art both Ottoman and European, and both Italian and Ottoman textile industries. There also are extended essays on Albanian clothing and identity, and on Ottoman influence in European dress in the Middle Ages, illustrations for which two articles form the majority of pictures in the section of plates near the rear of the book. I confess the photos of show more the insides of two complexly-worked ermine-lined kaftans have left quite an impression on me, and i've seen photos of many Ottoman kaftans. show less