What Can Medieval Women’s Writing Tell Us Today?

Workshop & Expedition

Premodern Arab women’s authorship of literary, scholarly, and popular knowledge forms has been mentioned widely in reference works. Their contributions, however, have not been fully preserved or documented. This leaves modern scholarly and popular imagination short of the ability to quote premodern women, or interact with their ideas, and meaningfully build on them. To challenge this, AGYA alumna Dr. Luise Fischer and AGYA member Prof. Dr. Enass Khansa created opportunities to discuss and deal with these conditions, giving contemporary thought the means, even if modestly, to recognize and engage with premodern women’s voices and contributions.

Rediscovering a Lost Voice: Amatullāh’s Story

Enass Khansa and Luise Fischer focused on a particular moment in the history of women’s writing: Before the 1500s, women’s authorship of knowledge forms rarely included authoring books (anthologies or complete treatises). One of the books that survived had been written by a woman scholar, Ama (or Amatullāh Umm Hāni'). The book is no longer extant, with the exception of individual folios that survived and have been transported at some point in the afterlives of this work into Morocco, where they are currently held in an archival collection of al-Qarawiyyīn library in Fez, Morocco. This evidence and her story was taken as the starting point to open the discussion on forgotten women’s impact on history.

By focussing on Amatullāh’s writings, we centred on unattended and often hidden female voices in the history of knowledge production. For that purpose, the workshop brought together international scholars from across the humanities and social sciences – including the history of knowledge, (trans)cultural history, language studies, literature, and education. Our conversations emphasised the richness of transregional and cross-lingual  studies – in female history and the history of knowledge more widely.

Luise Fischer, AGYA alumna

Interdisciplinary Workshop for Women’s Visibility

To explore Amatullāh's life and writings, Enass Khansa and Luise Fischer followed her traces with a documenting artist on a scientific expedition. Amatullāh's biography led them to Granada, Spain, where she lived. They took the opportunity of their expedition to lead an interdisciplinary workshop on ‘Imagining Premodern Arab Knowledge: A Conversation of Four Academic Traditions’ in Granada. Researchers from the School of Arabic Studies EEA, Granada, and Prof. Dr. Iyas Hassan, Director of the Department of Arab, Medieval and Modern Studies (DEAMM), Sorbonne University, France, were diving deep into the discussion of women’s in the history of thought, the knowledge transfer and its perception.

Unveiling Hidden Voices: A Project Series on Female Authorship from Medieval Times to Present

This tandem project implemented by AGYA alumna Luise Fischer and AGYA member Enass Khansa, builds upon the success of three previous AGYA projects: "Visual Interpretations of Medieval Stories for Young Readers" and "Visual Interpretations of Women’s Affective Histories". These projects utilized science comics to make medieval texts and stories appealing to young readers while also exploring women's authorship for contemporary women's empowerment. The project series intends to further enhance the knowledge of female writers from medieval times until today. The overarching aim is to enhance our understanding and cultural awareness of female voices and to contribute to a larger equality and intercultural exchange regarding the discourse of female authorship. By examining and rethinking the female voices of writing, this project contributes to greater equality and intercultural exchange in relation to the discourse on female authorship. By offering the practice of feminist and performative academic inquiry, it also challenges mainstream ways of doing inquiry and reacts to the call for more diverse, situated and experimental ways of producing and communicating knowledge in the humanities and social sciences.