Sara Verskin

I study the intellectual and social history of the medieval Arab-Islamic world. My main research interests are in the intersection of religion, gender, and medicine. I hold a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University.

My first book Barren Women: Religion and Medicine in the Medieval Islamic World was published in 2020. It is based on my dissertation, which was awarded the 2018 British Association for Islamic Studies - De Gruyter Prize in the Study of Islam and the Muslim World.

The book examines the ways in which infertile women were treated, both socially and medically. The first part of the book considers aspects of the Islamic laws of marriage, divorce, and inheritance, and how the cases of barren women teach us more about women’s vulnerabilities, advantages, and opportunities within the legal system. The second part of the book is about the history and practice of gynecology. It examines Arabo-Galenic ideas about women’s bodies and the extent to which male medical practitioners were involved in women’s healthcare. The final part of the book examines how some religious leaders considered healthcare to be a major site of competition between belief systems, and a vector for syncretism and heresy, because desperate sick people would seek care from practitioners with different religious beliefs. In the view of such thinkers, Muslim women played a particularly important role in this competition for hearts and minds. The themes of the book continue to resonate in my later research.

I am currently at work on a project examining the roles and testimony of midwives in lawsuits, mostly in North Africa and Islamic Spain. I am also working on a book about an 8th A.H./14th C.E. century treatise about popular religious practices in Mamluk Egypt. In addition, I continue to research and write about the history of the medical sciences, particularly as they relate to women.