Toxic Murder, Female Poisoners, and the Question of Agency at the Late Ottoman Law Courts, 1840–1908

Abstract

This article aims to fill a void in the history of Ottoman Empire by examining the role gender played at the nineteenth century Ottoman courts, which becomes visible only through a close scrutiny of nizamiye court records pertaining to female criminals, more specifically to women who stood trial for poisoning their husbands. So far, in the Ottoman history writing, violent female criminality has rarely attracted the attention of scholars, while female poisoners have only come to the fore in the context of imperial harem narratives. In this article, I focus on the voices of “ordinary” actors involved in such a crime and draw attention to the complex reasons that led women to kill in this particular way as well as the gender-based solidarity networks among women, the defensive strategies employed at the court, and judicial perceptions about female criminals, which regarded women as incompetent agents—nâkisat-ul-akl—and denied them agency.