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Between Dung and Blood

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Between Dung and Blood investigates the stories of two sixteenth-century saints: the Spanish Christian Teresa de Jesús and the Moroccan Sufi Sīdī Riḍwān al-Januwī, both from families of converts. T...
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  • 30 December 2025
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Between Dung and Blood investigates the stories of two sixteenth-century saints: the Spanish Christian Teresa de Jesús and the Moroccan Sufi Sīdī Riḍwān al-Januwī, both from families of converts. Through the stories of these saints, Manuela Ceballos reveals the roles played by blood and bodily pollution as substances and symbols in the religious and political fabric of the early modern Western Mediterranean. Drawing primarily on Arabic and Spanish sources, the author argues that in Morocco and Iberia, ideas about blood and bodily pollution helped shape processes of bodily differentiation as well as social hierarchies based on notions of ritual purity and impurity. Providing an inside look at the dynamics within Moroccan and Iberian societies as they grappled with the social and religious upheaval of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Ceballos shows that the real and imagined border between geographies and religious traditions could, at times, be porous and conducive to shared beliefs.
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Price: $95.00
Pages: 296
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Publication Date: 30 December 2025
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780520421035
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:

Manuela Ceballos is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Contents

Note on Transliteration and Dates
Acknowledgments

Introduction
1. Blood and Filth: A Background
2. From Between Dung and Blood Comes Milk: Reconsidering Purity Through Sīdī Riḍwān al-Januwī
3. The Blood and Body of Saint Teresa
4. By Way of Blood and Filth: Conceptions of Bodily Transmission in the Early Modern Western Mediterranean
5. Purity: Material and Genealogical Intersections
Conclusion: Stories That Matter

Notes
Bibliography
Index