Starting with the early Middle Ages and offering a broad survey through to the start of the early modern period, this essay examines a range of charms, incantations, prayers, talismans, amulets, recipes, and remedies. Many of these were certainly used for women and sometimes by women, such as charms on birthing scrolls or girdles. The analysis reveals the unexpectedly wide range of areas of expertise ascribed to medieval women, as is illustrated by Christine de Pizanߣs writings on warcraft and chivalry, and the guide to hunting, hawking and heraldry attributed to Dame Juliana Berners (The Book of St Albans). Finally, the essay looks at the extremely varied and encyclopaedic advice available to women found in the compendium known as The Kalender of Shepherds (c. 1490), an important source of folk belief, demonstrating the diversity of medieval womenߣs lore.

Chapter 4 introduces the diverse Islamic epistemes and knowledges encountered in the zongos and discusses how these inform the assertion and contestation of religious authority in these wards. Offering an ethnography of the diverse Islamic knowledge practices and discourses in the zongos and portraying different Islamic scholars, I discuss the diversity of their ʿilm in relation to the literature of an anthropology of knowledge. Through portrayals of three Islamic scholars from Kokote Zongo, with their diverse biographies of Islamic learning, I highlight the irreducible diversity of Islamic knowledges and epistemes encountered among them. This applies especially to their salient distinctions and contestations of an exoteric and an esoteric Islamic knowledge. These different knowledges are transmitted in distinct ways and through a variety of institutions, adding to the lived diversity of this religion. In turn, the Islamic scholars deploy and challenge their distinct knowledges in their sermons and counselling and thus not only engage with but propel the lived diversity of their religion. As I argue in this chapter, ʿilm is not a pregiven Islamic knowledge but a varied and contested field on which various actors seek to assert their religious authority as they engage with and (re)make the discursive tradition of Islam.