Gendered Grammar and Social Regulation in an Eighteenth-Century Albanian Ecclesiastical Curse Text

This article examines the gendered grammar of social regulation in an eighteenth-century Albanian ecclesiastical curse text known as Mallkimet që lëshon Ipeshkvi t’Enjten e Madhe (The Curses that the Bishop Releases on Holy Thursday). The study approaches the text as a linguistic and socio-historical case in which normative authority is articulated through grammatical form, lexical classification, and the distribution of agency. After screening the nineteen curse formulae preserved in the sequence, the article concentrates on those in which women are explicitly named or in which male conduct is regulated through its relation to women, especially in matters of marriage, abduction, kinship, pregnancy, separation, and household status. By combining morphosyntactic close reading with language-and-gender analysis, the article shows that women are repeatedly positioned as objects of action, relational persons defined through kinship or marital status, and bearers of social consequence. Male or norm-bearing figures, by contrast, tend to occupy the position of agent, decision-maker, or addressee of sanction. The article argues that this distribution of grammatical and social roles reveals a gendered structure of normative language. As a single-text case study, the Albanian material contributes to historical sociolinguistics and language-and-gender research by showing how ritual formulae may encode social hierarchy through syntax, reference, and repetition.