26 Jan 2021
By Katherine McKenna
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Book Announcement: Convent Networks in Early Modern Italy (ed. Marilyn Dunn and Saundra Weddle)

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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…
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15 Dec 2020
By Katherine McKenna
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Book Announcement – Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy, by Sharon Strocchia

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

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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…
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30 Nov 2020
By Katherine McKenna
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November 2020 – Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing and the Desire for In-person Contact

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Adriana (Guarro) Romero for the SSEMWG Blog “In-person contact is like a drug,” I texted my brother after a successful socially distanced dinner with my parents in late April. It was the first time I had seen anyone besides my husband since California instated a stay-at-home order in mid-March to curb the spread of COVID-19. My husband and I brought over a pizza, and in the middle of the long driveway leading up to my parents’ townhouse, we set up chairs ten feet apart from each other, wore masks, and talked for two hours. Although we had previously communicated with…
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03 Nov 2016
By Pia Jakobsson
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November 2016 – Bernardino Ochino and the Women Who Made His Career Possible

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Julie D. Campbell for the SSEMW Blog In January 2106, I attended a webinar entitled “Networking Early Modern Women,” intended to help scholars add early modern English women’s names to the Six Degrees of Francis Bacon project, a DH endeavor produced by a partnership between Carnegie Mellon University and Georgetown University. The Bacon project, co-founded by Christopher Warren and Daniel Shore, “aims to be the broadest, most accessible source of who knew whom in early modern Britain.” Warren says that Six Degrees shows two degrees of relationship—“Think friends and friends of friends.”[1] It occurred to me that if one mapped…
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