Manuela Ceballos, "Between Dung and Blood: Purity, Sainthood, and Power in the Early Modern Western Mediterranean" (U California Press, 2025)

Beyond the Margins: The University of California Press Podcast · Mar 13, 2026 · 1h 8m

Manuela Ceballos’ new book Between Dung and Blood: Purity, Sainthood, and Power in the Early Modern Western Mediterranean (University of California Press, 2025) engages with the life and legacies of two sixteenth-century saints; the Spanish Christian Teresa de Jesús (also known as Teresa of Avila) and the Moroccan Sufi Sidi Ridwan al-Januwi. The book draws from rich Arabic and Spanish sources that moves us between Morocco and Iberia. In the process, we learn that these saints both descent from families of converts and as such blood and bodily pollution operated as material and metaphoric…