Sharon T. Strocchia, Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy (I Tatti Studies in Renaissance History)
Date
2021-09-06
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Social History of Medicine
Abstract
Sharon Strocchia’s illuminating study of female health practitioners promises an ‘integrative, gendered approach’ to healthcare practices in early modern Italy. Though Strocchia’s goal is to study women and healthcare ‘through the prism of class,’ she ends up doing so much more than this, taking us into the gendered and (from the perspective of the history of medicine) understudied spaces of court, convent, and hospital, revealing the myriad ways in which women healers operated within the broader medical economy. Women’s engagement with medical knowledge—from herbals and books of secrets to laboratory experiments and apothecary activities—has been the subject of increasing attention by scholars over the past years. Strocchia’s book builds on such studies to delve further into medical praxis and the production of knowledge by female care providers in sixteenth-century Italy, a period marked by both cultural richness and the ‘social unraveling’ caused by war and disease.
Description
This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in Social History of Medicine following peer review. The version of record Meredith K Ray, Sharon T. Strocchia, Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy (I Tatti Studies in Renaissance History), Social History of Medicine, Volume 35, Issue 1, February 2022, Pages 323–324, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkab099 is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkab099. This article will be embargoed until 09/06/2023.
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Citation
Meredith K Ray, Sharon T. Strocchia, Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy (I Tatti Studies in Renaissance History), Social History of Medicine, Volume 35, Issue 1, February 2022, Pages 323–324, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkab099