The representation of slave girls in a physiognomic text of the fourteenth century

This article maps the intertextual connections of the section on female slaves of the Kitāb al-siyāsah fī ʿilm al-firāsah of Shams al- Dīn al-Dimashqī (d. 727/1327) and outlines its relation to its antecedents, its parallels, and its sources (or what the author claims to be such). The text of Shams al- Dīn al-Dimashqī is then read in conversation with materials on female slaves of a legal nature (normative texts and purchase deeds), in order to compare their different narratives of the feminine and to show their nature as a construct.