In November 1620, Maria Maddalena of Austria, grand duchess of Tuscany, was feeling distinctly under the weather. Stomach ailments and an arthritic knee plagued the thirty-one-year-old noblewoman, who turned to her epistolary confidante and medical advisor, Orsola Fontebuoni, for relief. Fontebuoni, a Benedictine nun and skilled healer who trafficked remedies both spiritual and naturalistic at the Medici court, sent aid in the form of acciaio stillato (a stomach-soothing wine in which iron nails had soaked) and the sacral “liqueur of S. Niccolò di Bari” (71). By all accounts, the first of the ailments was cured, though the Tuscan duo remained at pains to wangle an effective arthritis cure for years to come.
Sharon Strocchia's closely researched monograph brims with stories like that of Fontebuoni and Maria Maddalena's medical alliance. At a compact 225 pages, this tightly written work synthesizes a half-decade's research at Italian archives (primarily the Archivio di Stato, Florence) into cogent prose whose workings illuminate women actors within the complex landscape of early modern health. Its contents are outwardly structured around class, with chapters dedicated to noblewomen, nuns, and impoverished hospital nurses. As Strocchia herself demonstrates, however, cross-class interactions permeated Renaissance care practices; practically speaking, space as much as social status organizes the meat of her investigation into the health-giving roles performed by contemporary women. Forgotten Healers takes readers from the bedchambers and nurseries of the domestic sphere to hushed monastic libraries, from bustling convent pharmacies to the crowded wards of an urban pox hospital, in which spaces women (and sometimes men) from diverse backgrounds undertook medical ministration, commerce, and innovation in the period between 1500 and 1630.
Chapter 1 is set at court and uses case studies of Medici noblewomen Maria Salviati and Eleonora of Toledo to examine the praxis and politics of everyday healthcare. Strocchia draws on letters and recipe books to convincingly situate educated elite women as “guardians of healthy living” (15) within the pluralistic world of Renaissance medicine. Household practitioners typically served as the first line of response to illness; readers follow Salviati and Eleonora as they marshal a combination of book learning and hands-on medical experience to care for their families, distribute political favor, and circulate therapeutic knowledge. The cultural mechanics of knowledge transmission comprise a point of analysis that runs throughout the book, which avers that “knowledge-making about the body was a networked social enterprise involving a rich tableau of participants” (8). So too was the early modern medical economy. In chapter 2, Strocchia excavates the feminine networks that bound Florentine convents (e.g., Le Murate) to European courts in order to illuminate the medicinal function of contemporary gifting culture. Convent patronage was a respectable outlet by which Western noblewomen could assert agency, acquire clients, and perform piety; in turn, nuns formulated remedies and spiritual gifts for their patrons and deployed courtly munificence to further their charitable mission, often by constructing commercial pharmacies.
Renaissance women's pharmaceutical work constitutes another thematic anchor of the book. Chapters 3 and 4 investigate convent pharmacies and the nun apothecaries who ran them through the lens of economics and medical learning/invention, respectively. The breadth of Strocchia's archival research is most apparent here as she distills convent sources such as account books, chronicles, and library inventories, as well as Florentine government records and books of secrets, into a vivid tableau of monastic healers’ business ventures and intellectual lives. The commercialization of Italian convent pharmacies was a sixteenth-century phenomenon driven by church investment in social welfare, rising monachization rates, and, in Medici Florence, state interest in public health. Florentine nun apothecaries served the urban poor, trained apprentices, studied Latinate medical tracts, and invested in new technologies. Outside convent walls, some Renaissance women pursued successful medical careers as nurses at popular institutions like the Incurabili, the Florentine pox hospital and the focus of chapter 5. There female healers served the community as public agents of morality and managers of the nonnatural elements of care (e.g., diet, air quality, and emotional health).
A quick note about the title and introduction. As this summary evinces, Forgotten Healers is decidedly Florentine in focus. While some reference to other Italian cities is made, the majority of its case studies are Florentine. Additional discussion on the question of Florence as a proxy for Italy would be welcome in the introduction, as would a more extensive historiographic review (instead, footnotes direct curious readers to several state-of-the-field summaries located in other sources). In general, Strocchia's succinct and approachable writing style ensures that Forgotten Healers will be an enlightening read for disciplinary experts, interested generalists, and graduate students alike. The text meticulously delineates female healers’ varied contributions to the therapeutic arts in late Renaissance Florence, shedding new light on early modern women in the home, convent, and community as both producers and consumers of medical knowledge. Strocchia's revelation of the networked nature of care is particularly useful and will, I imagine, inspire further research as all good scholarship should do. Forgotten Healers is a welcome addition to the field.
