Introduction

Scholarship on the history of women in premodern Morocco is a new field still confined to a handful of Moroccan scholars. Reconstructing past women's lives calls for an expertise in literary Arabic and in the courtly (makhzanī) style, an ability to decipher manuscripts, and a familiarity with the techniques of local research. Bureaucratic traditions were not well developed, and the mechanisms for preserving official documents haphazard. The court re…