This article offers an anthropological reading of Ottoman sources on Libya to

shed light on the history of women in Islamic contexts while addressing key

issues of gender, power, and representation in history writing. It features the

potential of a method that, while illuminating the presence of women in a

variety of archival and textual Ottoman sources, questions the gendered

nature of their representations as historical subjects. In so doing, the article

contributes to current debates on history writing and articulates the

perspective of a scholar of Women’s History in the Islamic context. The article

first outlines some of the challenges that have been identified and tackled by

feminist historians over recent decades as for the search for sources in which

women’s lives can be retraced. It then introduces the main sources that were

used in the research – a civic chronicle and a petition – and proposes more

general reflections on method in historical research, in which the possibility of

tracking women’s life journeys in predominantly masculine sources is critically

explored. Finally, a series of female figures emerging from such sources as for

the case of Ottoman Tripoli (North-Africa) is studied, with an effort of

reflection on social typologies and categories in which women were often

reduced to clichéd characters like the Wife, the Widow, the Slave, and the

Prostitute.