Gender relations in the spaces of Andalusian cities 
(Manuela Marín Niño, Christine Mazzoli-Guintard)
We shall be focussing on the cities of al-Andalus that also fall within what is today Andalusia (above all Cordoba, Seville and Granada), and will be comparing the situation in the different historical periods. Our aim is to reread the sources from a gender perspective, asking ourselves about the spaces of the city in which women appear and their relation with the spaces commonly frequented by men. In so doing we hope to discover more about the role of women as architectural patrons and seek to visualize the role they played in the planning and layout of mediaeval Islamic cities and their contribution to the maintenance of benevolent institutions, which had an important impact on mediaeval societies, and gender relations in less privileged social classes. We will be analysing from a diachronic perspective the different spaces in which the sources tell us that women were present, in order to identify whether gender relations in the spaces evolved in any way over the eight centuries of al-Andalus. We will also be exploring the different ways in which men and women are presented in the different urban spaces, in order to be able to distinguish between the image presented in written texts and the reality, to identify in particular literary stereotypes and highlight how these texts often display more the wishes of the author than the real situation of their time. For this study we will begin with literary Arabic sources such as chronicles, geographical works and legal sources such as compilations of
fatwas and manuals of
hisba . We will then go on to analyse the material sources (epigraphic and archaeological evidence) .
