| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Middle East and Northern Africa

Leslie Peirce. Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2003. Pp. xv, 460. Cloth $65.00, paper $29.95.

The history of the early modern Middle East is being rewritten, not only through bottom-up social history but from the outside in, through local studies of the Ottoman Empire's many provinces. Leslie Peirce's exploration of the judicial court and legal culture of sixteenth-century Aintab (modern-day Gaziantep, Turkey, on the Syrian border) focuses on Ottoman Islamic space outside Istanbul and, often, beyond its initiatives. Like other breakthrough studies in recent years, this book makes use of Islamic court records (Turkish sicil; Arabic sijil), in this instance the 3,000 civil and criminal cases heard in the court of Aintab in the twelve months from September 1540 to October 1541. Peirce differs from other scholars, however, in having consulted virtually every other major archive and document collection to inform her study. The result is a prodigious work about the lived law and its importance to a newly incorporated (from the Mamluk Empire) Ottoman province. As a local history in imperial context, it differs from the dynastic concerns of Peirce's first book, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (1993), but is every bit its equal in meticulous scholarship.

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