gender – Society for the Study of

26 Jan 2021

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Book Announcement: Convent Networks in Early Modern Italy (ed. Marilyn Dunn and Saundra Weddle)

Articlesgender, Italy, nuns, social networks

Marilyn Dunn and Saundra Weddle, ed., Convent Networks in Early Modern Italy, Europa Sacra (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2020). Although many monastic communities of women had previously separated themselves from the earthly and mundane realms as an aid to spiritual devotion, Pope Boniface VIII famously and definitively declared in his 1298 decretal, Periculoso, that all nuns were to be perpetually cloistered. In keeping with this regulation, the walls of early modern convents came to suggest the existence of absolute conditions, but these seldom existed in reality. While the built enclosure communicated the convent’s supposed isolation from the secular world, connections between…

Book Announcement – Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy, by Sharon Strocchia

Articlesgender, health, history of medicine, Italy, mobility, networks, nuns

Sharon T. Strocchia, Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019) One of the most striking features to emerge from recent studies of Renaissance medicine is the sheer diversity of female practitioners who anchored a wider medical economy. Thanks to a growing body of scholarship, we know that women from northern Europe to the Mediterranean basin permeated every aspect of healthcare services between 1400 and 1700. The household remained the primary locus of care well into the eighteenth century, despite the proliferation of hospitals and other charitable institutions. Women from…

April 2019 – Axes of Uncertainty and Recovering Women’s Voices in Early Modern Miscellanies.

Articlesauthorship, gender, miscellanies, power

Eric McCarthy for the SSEMWG Blog I am delighted to contribute a blog post on the theme of “Power, Authority, and Women's Voices in Early Modern Texts, Criticism, and the Academy Today,” not least because it relates to the work I’ve been doing for the ERC-funded project "RECIRC: The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1550–1700" over the last few years. I began with what seemed like a straightforward question: which female-authored works were transcribed most often in manuscript miscellanies? It was easy enough to produce a ranked list of the works in the miscellanies we had consulted,…

Tag: gender