Shulamit and Margarete: Power, Gender, and Religion in a Rural Society in Eighteenth-Century Europe »

Claudia Ulbrich, Dr. phil. (1977) University of Saarbrücken, is professor of modern history at the Free University of Berlin. She has published extensively on the history of rural societies in the early modern period and on gender history. She is co-editor of L'Homme. Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft.

Ulbrich (modern history, Free U. of Berlin, Germany) reconstructs the life stories of Christian and Jewish women who lived in the 18th in Steinbiedersdorf, a small village on the border of France and Germany, considering the project a means to examine the interconnections among power, gender, and religion in an estate-based society. She employs an "ecological narrative method" that delves into "women's gossip," words of scolding and invective in order to reveal gender-specific ways of conflict in realms that have often been conceived of predominantly in male terms: the church, the court, or just around the neighborhood. In reconstructing individual women's lives, she attempts to situate them in the proper socioeconomic, political, and cultural framework and to bring together the scholarly traditions of women's history, gender history, and religious history. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

1. Introduction

2. Approaches: The Village
3. Searching for Clues: Spheres of Female Agency in the Mirror of Biography
4. Contexts: Outlines of a Village Society
5. A Shift in Perspective: The History of the Jewish Community
6. “Woman—She is the House”: Glimpses of Jewish Women’s Lives
7. From the Margin to the Center: Christian-Jewish Relations
8. Concluding Reflections

Appendix: Last Will of Abraham Jacob

Bibliography Index of Subjects Index of Authors