Prescriptions for Women: Alchemy, Medicine, and the Renaissance Debate Over Women

FAIN: FA-55136-10

Meredith Kennedy Ray
University of Delaware (Newark, DE 19711-3651)

This project examines the role of women as writers, readers, and practitioners in the arenas of early modern medicine and alchemy. It broadens our understanding of women in Renaissance Europe and, especially, in Italy, by examining their involvement in scientific culture as well as their literary presence as the subjects, audiences, and producers of the medical and alchemical texts known as "books of secrets." As this investigation reveals, a deep interest in Renaissance Italy in works devoted to medical and alchemical remedies and secrets was deeply intertwined with notions about sex and gender and with the cultural polemics of the early modern debate over women, which sought to describe and define women's nature and social role. My project thus illuminates the crucial links between discourses of sex and gender and those of medicine and alchemy--between protofeminism and protoscience.

Associated Products

Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Book)
Title: Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy
Author: Meredith K. Ray
Abstract: he era of the Scientific Revolution has long been epitomized by Galileo. Yet many women were at its vanguard, deeply invested in empirical culture. They experimented with medicine and practical alchemy at home, at court, and through collaborative networks of practitioners. In academies, salons, and correspondence, they debated cosmological discoveries; in their literary production, they used their knowledge of natural philosophy to argue for their intellectual equality to men. Meredith Ray restores the work of these women to our understanding of early modern scientific culture. Her study begins with Caterina Sforza’s alchemical recipes; examines the sixteenth-century vogue for “books of secrets”; and looks at narratives of science in works by Moderata Fonte and Lucrezia Marinella. It concludes with Camilla Erculiani’s letters on natural philosophy and, finally, Margherita Sarrocchi’s defense of Galileo’s “Medicean” stars. Combining literary and cultural analysis, Daughters of Alchemy contributes to the emerging scholarship on the variegated nature of scientific practice in the early modern era. Drawing on a range of under-studied material including new analyses of the Sarrocchi–Galileo correspondence and a previously unavailable manuscript of Sforza’s Experimenti, Ray’s book rethinks early modern science, properly reintroducing the integral and essential work of women.
Year: 2015
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/daughters-of-alchemy-women-and-scientific-culture-in-early-modern-italy/oclc/890377712&referer=brief_results
Primary URL Description: WorldCat results page
Secondary URL: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674504233
Secondary URL Description: Harvard University Press catalogue website
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780674504233

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