Pernilla Myrne
Senior Lecturer
Department of Languages andAbout Pernilla Myrne
Researcher, docent
Background
I completed my PhD in 2008 with a thesis on early Arabic-Islamic biographies on women. After having worked as a teacher for some years, I obtained a postdoctoral fellowship funded by the Swedish Research Council, which allowed me to spend 2011 and 2012 at New York University, where I examined gender and pleasure in premodern Arabic erotic literature. I have worked as a senior lecturer at the University of Gothenburg since January 2015. 2020–2021 I was a research fellow at Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, where I worked on a critical edition of the tenth-century erotic manual Jawāmiʿ al-Ladhdha.
Research
My research interests include the representation of women in pre-modern Arabic literature, attitudes to sexuality in the medieval Islamic world, as well as women as creative agents. I am also interested in social history, in particular the role of women and slaves in society. One of my research interests is Islamic manuscript culture, and I am currently mapping the manuscript traditions of medieval Arabic sex advice manuals, a hitherto unexplored primary source material.
Research Projects
2024–2028: History of sexuality in the Arabic-islamic world: Libertinism, sexual morality and legal regulation, c. 900–1500 (funded by the Swedish Research Council).
The purpose of this project is to examine ideas about sexuality and sexual conduct in the Arabic-Islamic world and how these ideas changed from the establishment of an Islamic sexual jurisprudence in the 10th centuries to the Ottoman conquest of the Arab Middle East in the early 16th century. This period is characterized by a discrepancy between legal-religious norms and attitudes towards sexuality in other discourses, where legal regulations on issues such as extramarital relations and same-sex desire were ignored or even contested. For instance, legal scholars regarded same-sex acts illicit and punishable by death, still male homoerotic desire is the main motif in poetry from this period, and, judging by travellers’ reports and the many casual references to it in historical writing, it seems to have been considered normal. This discrepancy is notable and often commented upon, yet there are few informed attempts to explain it.
It will especially look into the transmission and receptions of ideas about sexuality in some historical contexts, 10th-11th c. Iraq, 11- 12th c. Syria and Northern Mesopotamia, and late 13th-15th c. Mamluk Syria and Egypt. The textual evidence that will be used include legal treatises, collections of legal opinions (fatwas) and case studies, manuals for protecting public order), books on advice and ethics from legalistic perspectives, anti-heresy writings, chronicles and biographies, poetry and belles-lettres, books on love and erotica, marriage, and sex manuals.
2018–2020: Medieval Arabic sex manuals; manuscript tradition and reception (funded by the Swedish Research Council).
In this project, I examine Arabic-Islamic sex manuals and their reception by means of mapping the manuscript traditions and examining manuscript evidence. This genre flourished for centuries and, though always positive to matrimonial sexual pleasure, the authors adopted different approaches to more contentious issues, such as same-sex desire, extramarital affairs, and women’s sexual agency. By investigating the spread and readership of the different books, the project seeks to identify the variety of attitudes towards sexuality across time and space in the premodern Arab-Islamic world.
2015–2018: Love, Body, and Desire: Attitudes to Erotic Love and Women’s Sexuality in Premodern Arabic Literature (funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation).
A main aim of this project was to investigate how the intellectual climate during the Abbasid Caliphate contributed to attitudes to erotic love and women’s sexuality. The project resulted in the monography Female Sexuality in the Early Medieval Islamic World, published by IB Tauris in 2020.
2012–2015: Eloquent women: Genre, rhetoric and gender in early Arabic literature (funded by the Swedish Research Council).
In this project, I examined the words of women were represented in Early Arabic literature. Women were marginalised in the early written Arabic culture, as they did not learn to read and write to the same degree as men. Nevertheless, the classical Arabic literature is full of portrayals of eloquent women, whose words are quoted with admiration. They often used their rhetorical skills to help their families, or simply to highlight their own qualities.
Teaching
I have taught Arabic and Middle Eastern history since 2005. I also teach Arabic and Arabic literature and I lecture on various aspects of Arabic-Islamic history and culture.