Introduction 9 A'yan al-Mi'a al-Thamina of Ibn Hajar al-‘Asqalam (d. 852/1449) and al-Daw' al-Lami' fi A'yan al-Qarn al-Tasi' of al-SakhawI (d. 902/1497). Such works amply attest women’s activities and the widespread acceptance of their participation in religious education. The abundance of data, however, should not blind us to its inherent limitations. First, these sources were composed by men, and we have few self-narratives of women’s experiences in this arena. Second, most entries on women in biographical compendia are formulaic and frugal, hindering our ability to compose a nuanced history. Lineages, death dates, teacher-student networks, and remarks on the moral character and personal piety of various women comprise the bulk of what early and classical biographers preserved for posterity. Such information goes only so far in our attempts at historical reconstruction. Needless to say, classical Muslim biographers were not interested in issues of women’s empowerment or the role of gender in determining women’s educational access. Questions about women’s concerns, their daily lives, and their routines can only be answered inferentially, sometimes by reading into the silences of our sources. Two other sources of more limited utility that contain scattered references to women’s narration of reports are legal compendia and manuals on the sciences of badith transmission. The prescriptive nature of both genres dictates a different methodological approach. For example, al-Kifaya fi 'Urn al-Riwaya , the badith manual of al-Khatlb al-Baghdadi (d. 463/ 1071), prescribes a curriculum for study and the appropriate etiquette for teachers and students. We cannot, of course, assume that students maintained these standards. In fact, the presumption is often that if authorities repeatedly insist on a protocol, it is because that protocol is being violated. In general, the extent to which individual men and women adhered to the standards enunciated by leading scholars must be gleaned from other sources related directly to the individual in question. Similarly, legal manuals present historical evidence only to the extent necessary to substantiate or undermine the claims of jurists. On the topic of women’s access to public space such as mosques (popular sites for religious instruction), badith reports are presented selectively to support a juristic prescription. Nevertheless, judicious use of these sources can help us recreate some of the historical circumstances affecting women’s participation in the transmission of religious knowledge. For the earliest decades of Islamic history, we can look to the individual badith credited to female narrators. The chains of transmission (isnads) appended to these reports can augment our knowledge of the teacherstudent networks of the women who appear in them. An analysis of the