Tag Archives: mobility
Book Announcement – Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy, by Sharon Strocchia
In this post, Sharon Strocchia (Emory University) shares a description of her monograph Forgotten Healthers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy (Harvard University Press, 2019). The winner of the Society for Italian Historical Studies’ Marraro Prize, Forgotten Healers examines the broad palette of Renaissance women’s contributions to medical knowledge, empirical culture, and contemporary health practices in the period between 1500 and 1630. Continue reading
November 2020 – Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing and the Desire for In-person Contact
When researching Renaissance women’s letter writing as a grad student, I quickly learned that early modern women had a keen awareness of the intimacy that could be re-created through correspondence in order to bridge geographical and temporal gaps between friends and family. Though it seems obvious in hindsight, I did not immediately realize that letters could only bridge those gaps for so long. … Nearly five hundred years later amid a pandemic, I personally related to their yearning for face-to-face interaction and their desire to find ways to advance it. Continue reading
May 2017 – Creative Women on the Move: Two Transnational Celebrities, An Actor and a Calligrapher
Sarah Ross for the SSEMW Blog
Early-modern women moved. Even if much prescriptive literature consigned women to domestic drudgery in fixed abodes, their lived experiences often evinced considerable mobility artistically, spiritually, intellectually, and physically — as readers of this blog series are now well aware. Joining the conversation, I would like to (re)introduce to readers two fascinating women who crossed multiple borders, in multiple senses: Isabella Andreini (c.1562-1604) and Esther Inglis (c.1571-1624). Andreini and Inglis had a great deal in common, even if at first glance they seem to have inhabited very different worlds. The Italian Andreini earned accolades as a poet, as the author of a wildly popular pastoral drama titled Mirtilla (The Blueberry, in its tenth edition by 1616), and as a commedia dell’arte performer. Inglis, French by birth and Scottish by marriage, devoted her life to work as a calligrapher and Christian humanist Continue reading