428 family: further reading (continues) Their women are of surpassing beauty, and are shown more respect than the men The state of affairs amongst these people is indeed extraordinary Their men show no signs of jealousy whatever; no one claims descent from his father, but on the contrary from his mother’s brother A person’s heirs are his sister’s sons, not his own sons This is a thing which I have seen nowhere in the world except among the Indians of Malabar But those are heathens; these people are Muslims, punctilious in observing the hours of prayer, studying books of law, and memorizing the Koran Yet their women show no bashfulness before men and not veil themselves, though they are assiduous in attending the prayers Any man who wishes to marry one of them may so, but they not travel with their husbands, and even if one desired to so her family would not allow her to go further reading Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005) Karen Olsen Bruhns and Karen E Stothert, Women in Ancient America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999) Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Confucianism and Family Rituals in Imperial China (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991) David Herlihy, Women, Family and Society in Medieval Europe (Providence, R.I.: Berghahn Books, 1995) James E Lindsay, Daily Life in the Medieval Islamic World (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005) Patricia Plunket, ed., Domestic Ritual in Ancient Mesoamerica (Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, University of California, 2002) Robert S Santley and Kenneth G Hirth, eds., Prehispanic Domestic Units in Western Mesoamerica: Studies of the Household, Compound, and Residence (Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press, 1993) ▶ festivals introduction The impulse for humans to gather together to celebrate important events, community milestones, and rites of passage runs as far back as human history itself During the medieval period people toiled hard as they tried to scratch out a living The women there have “friends” and “companions” amongst the men outside their own families, and the men in the same way have “companions” amongst the women of other families A man may go into his house and find his wife entertaining her “companion” but he takes no objection to it One day at Iwalatan I went into the qadi’s house, after asking his permission to enter, and found with him a young woman of remarkable beauty When I saw her I was shocked and turned to go out, but she laughed at me, instead of being overcome by shame, and the qadi said to me “Why are you going out? She is my companion.” I was amazed at their conduct, for he was a theologian and a pilgrim [to Mecca] to boot I was told that he had asked the sultan’s permission to make the pilgrimage that year with his “companion”— whether this one or not I cannot say—but the sultan would not grant it From: Ibn Battuta, Travels in Asia and Africa 1325–1354, trans and ed H A R Gibb (London: Broadway House, 1929) Their lives were precarious At any time disease could strike, rivers could flood, crops could fail, the ground and skies could dry up, and earthquakes, storms, and volcanic eruptions could disrupt and destroy their lives People generally had few sources of entertainment, so community festivals were an important way of putting aside the hardships of life for a while While the nature of these festivals varied across the world, of course, a number of common themes can be identified First, many festivals revolved around religious events In Christian Europe numerous ancient festivals having to with the arrival of spring or winter were transformed by the church into such religious festivals as Easter and Christmas, while Halloween evolved from an ancient Celtic Feast of the Dead to the church’s All Souls’ Day Many modern traditions associated with holidays—Easter eggs and bunnies, Halloween costumes and “trick or treat,” Christmas trees and Nativity scenes—are survivals from medieval religious celebrations, themselves survivals from more ancient pre-Christian Roman and Celtic traditions Additionally, communities in Christian Europe conducted festivals surrounding the life of a patron saint who was important to the area or country; Saint George of Scotland was a good example These festivals could be marked by processions, during which statues of the saint were car-