Sharon Strocchia
I am a social and cultural historian who has published widely on women, religion, and society in Renaissance Italy. In recent years, my research has shifted to issues of health and healing in early modern Europe, particularly in relation to gender. I've written about female apothecaries, care practices, and women's mental health in sixteenth-century Italy. My most recent book, Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy (Harvard University Press, 2019), was awarded three prizes: the 2020 Marraro Prize by the Society for Italian Historical Studies; the 2021 Gordan Prize by the Renaissance Society of America for best book in Renaissance studies; and the 2021 Rossiter Prize from the History of Science Society. Drawing on archival sources from Florence, Rome, and Bologna, the study situates women as agents of health and healing in the shifting medical landscape of sixteenth-century Italy. I argue that increased demand for healthcare services and a more robust emphasis on preventive health in the sixteenth centuries opened new opportunities for women in medical provisioning. As apothecaries, household experts, hospital nurses, and charitable caregivers working within increasingly coordinated networks of care, female practitioners both delivered crucial services and helped transform convents, conservatories, and princely courts into important sites of vernacular knowledge production. Using gender as the primary optic, my project positions medically-informed women as significant knowledge brokers and revises understandings of how Renaissance healthcare was organized, practiced and gendered. Currently I am working on a book-length project examining the commercialization of medicines in early modern Italy.
Phone: 404-727-4285
Address: Dept. of History, Emory University, Atlanta GA 30322 USA
Phone: 404-727-4285
Address: Dept. of History, Emory University, Atlanta GA 30322 USA
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Books by Sharon Strocchia
In Renaissance Italy women played a more central role in providing health care than historians have thus far acknowledged. Women from all walks of life-from household caregivers and nurses to nuns working as apothecaries-drove the Italian medical economy. In convent pharmacies, pox hospitals, girls' shelters, and homes, women were practitioners and purveyors of knowledge about health and healing, making significant contributions to early modern medicine. Sharon Strocchia offers a wealth of new evidence about how illness was diagnosed and treated, whether by noblewomen living at court or poor nurses living in hospitals. She finds that women expanded on their roles as health care providers by participating in empirical work and the development of scientific knowledge. Nuns, in particular , were among the most prominent manufacturers and vendors of pharmaceutical products. Their experiments with materials and techniques added greatly to the era's understanding of medical care. Thanks to their excellence in medicine, urban Italian women had greater access to commerce than perhaps any other women in Europe. Forgotten Healers provides a more accurate picture of the pursuit of health in Renaissance Italy. More broadly, by emphasizing that the frontlines of medical care are often found in the household and other spaces thought of as female, Strocchia encourages us to rethink the history of medicine. Sharon T. Strocchia is Professor of History at Emory University. Her research focuses on the social and cultural history of Renaissance Italy, gender and sexuality in early modern Europe, and the history of health and medicine. Her most recent book, Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence, won the Marraro Prize for the best book on Italian history from the American Catholic Historical Association.
This path-breaking collection offers an integrative model for understanding health and healing in Europe and the Mediterranean from 1250 to 1550. By foregrounding gender as an organizing principle of healthcare, the contributors challenge traditional binaries that ahistorically separate care from cure, medicine from religion, and domestic healing from fee-for-service medical exchanges. The essays collected here illuminate previously hidden and undervalued forms of healthcare and varieties of body knowledge produced and transmitted outside the traditional settings of university, guild, and academy. They draw on non-traditional sources – vernacular regimens, oral communications, religious and legal sources, images and objects – to reveal additional locations for producing body knowledge in households, religious communities, hospices, and public markets. Emphasizing cross-confessional and multilinguistic exchange, the essays also reveal the multiple pathways for knowledge transfer in these centuries. Gender, Health, and Healing, 1250-1550 provides a synoptic view of how gender and cross-cultural exchange shaped medical theory and practice in later medieval and Renaissance societies.
Sara Ritchey is Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the author of Holy Matter: Changing Perceptions of the Material World in Late Medieval Christianity (2014) and a forthcoming book on late medieval religious women’s therapeutic knowledge and healthcare practices (2021).
Sharon Strocchia is Professor of History at Emory University in Atlanta. A social and cultural historian of Renaissance Italy, she has published widely on women, religion, and health-related topics. Her most recent book is Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy (2019).
Women and Healthcare in Early Modern Europe is a special issue of Renaissance Studies. (Vol. 28, no. 4, September 2014; Guest editor: Sharon T. Strocchia). This collection of essays by an international team of scholars brings fresh interpretive perspectives and impressive archival research to bear on the reappraisal of women’s medical activities in early modern Europe. Spanning England and the continent from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the collection situates female practitioners not on the margins of medical practice but rather at the nexus of household medicine, emerging structures of public health, and the production of medical knowledge. The essays demonstrate how increased demand for healthcare services in the early modern period opened new opportunities for women’s participation in a variety of health-related activities, from pharmacy and ‘physick’ to the provision of care. Drawing on a wide range of sources—court records, letters, inventories, printed herbals, parish account books, physicians’ journals, proceedings of state health boards—the collection showcases how innovative public health initiatives capitalized on domestic medical skills and probes sites of knowledge production and exchange outside university and guild settings. Whether spotlighting local artisans and noblewomen who worked without formal compensation or ‘expert’ practitioners who purveyed their skills in the marketplace, the essays cast new light on women’s claims to medical expertise and their self-perception as healers. Taking up issues of importance for Renaissance scholars working across the disciplines, this collection re-orients our understanding of how healthcare was organized, practiced and gendered in early modern Europe.
Table of Contents:
• Sharon T. Strocchia, Introduction: Women and Healthcare in Early Modern Europe
• Debra Blumenthal, Domestic Medicine: Slaves, Servants, and Female Medical Expertise in Late Medieval Valencia
• Alisha Rankin, Exotic Materials and Treasured Knowledge: The Valuable Legacy of Noblewomen’s Remedies in Early Modern Germany
• Elaine Leong, ‘Herbals she peruseth’: Reading Medicine in Early Modern England
• Richelle Munkhoff, Poor Women and Parish Public Health in Sixteenth-Century London
• Jane Stevens Crawshaw, Families, Medical Secrets and Public Health in Early Modern Venice
• Annemarie Kinzelbach, Women and Healthcare in Early Modern German Towns
The articles by Leong and Stevens Crawshaw are available open access, and plans are underway to make the editor's Introduction open access in the near future.
https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/nuns-and-nunneries-renaissance-florence
The 15th century was a time of dramatic and decisive change for nuns and nunneries in Florence. In the course of that century, the city’s convents evolved from small, semiautonomous communities to large civic institutions. By 1552, roughly one in eight Florentine women lived in a religious community. Historian Sharon T. Strocchia analyzes this stunning growth of female monasticism, revealing the important roles these women and institutions played in the social, economic, and political history of Renaissance Florence.
It became common practice during this time for unmarried women in elite society to enter convents. This unprecedented concentration of highly educated and well-connected women transformed convents into sites of great patronage and social and political influence. As their economic influence also grew, convents found new ways of supporting themselves; they established schools, produced manuscripts, and manufactured textiles.
Strocchia has mined previously untapped archival materials to uncover how convents shaped one of the principal cities of Renaissance Europe. She demonstrates the importance of nuns and nunneries to the booming Florentine textile industry and shows the contributions that ordinary nuns made to Florentine life in their roles as scribes, stewards, artisans, teachers, and community leaders. In doing so, Strocchia argues that the ideals and institutions that defined Florence were influenced in great part by the city’s powerful female monastics.
Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence shows for the first time how religious women effected broad historical change and helped write the grand narrative of medieval and Renaissance Europe. The book is a valuable text for students and scholars in early modern European history, religion, women’s studies, and economic history.
Table Of Contents
List of Tables, Graphs, and Figures
Preface
1. The Growth of Florentine Convents
Convents in Crisis
The Midcentury Resurgence
The Rush to the Convent
2. Nuns, Neighbors, and Kinsmen
From Neighborhood Enclaves to Citywide Institutions
Property and the Topography of Power
Defenders of the Parish
3. The Renaissance Convent Economy
The Structure of Convent Finance
The Paradox of ''Private'' Wealth
Balancing the Budget
The Medici and the Monte
4. Invisible Hands: Renaissance Nuns at Work
Economic Strategies and Opportunities
The Century of Silk: Nuns and Textile Production
Three Case Studies in Textile Work
Books and Educational Activities
5. Contesting the Boundaries of Enclosure
The Practice of Open Reclusion, 1300–1450
Privatization, Enclosure, and Reform, 1430–1500
The Florentine ''Night Officers''
Ecclesiastical Reform Initiatives, 1500–1540
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Articles by Sharon Strocchia
Mapping Space, Sense, and Movement in Florence explores the potential of digital mapping or Historical GIS as a research and teaching tool to enable researchers and students to uncover the spatial, kinetic and sensory dimensions of the early modern city.
The exploration focuses on new digital research and mapping projects that engage the rich social, cultural, and artistic life of Florence in particular. One is a new GIS tool known as DECIMA, (Digitally-Encoded Census Information and Mapping Archive), and the other is a smartphone app called Hidden Florence. The international collaborators who have helped build these and other projects address three questions: how such projects can be created when there are typically fewer sources than for modern cities; how they facilitate more collaborative models for historical research into social relations, senses, and emotions; and how they help us interrogate older historical interpretations and create new models of analysis and communication. Four authors examine technical issues around the software programs and manuscripts. Five then describe how GIS can be used to advance and develop existing research projects. Finally, four authors look to the future and consider how digital mapping transforms the communication of research results, and makes it possible to envision new directions in research.
This exciting new volume is illustrated throughout with maps, screenshots and diagrams to show the projects at work. It will be essential reading for students and scholars of early modern Italy, the Renaissance and digital humanities.
In Renaissance Italy women played a more central role in providing health care than historians have thus far acknowledged. Women from all walks of life-from household caregivers and nurses to nuns working as apothecaries-drove the Italian medical economy. In convent pharmacies, pox hospitals, girls' shelters, and homes, women were practitioners and purveyors of knowledge about health and healing, making significant contributions to early modern medicine. Sharon Strocchia offers a wealth of new evidence about how illness was diagnosed and treated, whether by noblewomen living at court or poor nurses living in hospitals. She finds that women expanded on their roles as health care providers by participating in empirical work and the development of scientific knowledge. Nuns, in particular , were among the most prominent manufacturers and vendors of pharmaceutical products. Their experiments with materials and techniques added greatly to the era's understanding of medical care. Thanks to their excellence in medicine, urban Italian women had greater access to commerce than perhaps any other women in Europe. Forgotten Healers provides a more accurate picture of the pursuit of health in Renaissance Italy. More broadly, by emphasizing that the frontlines of medical care are often found in the household and other spaces thought of as female, Strocchia encourages us to rethink the history of medicine. Sharon T. Strocchia is Professor of History at Emory University. Her research focuses on the social and cultural history of Renaissance Italy, gender and sexuality in early modern Europe, and the history of health and medicine. Her most recent book, Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence, won the Marraro Prize for the best book on Italian history from the American Catholic Historical Association.
This path-breaking collection offers an integrative model for understanding health and healing in Europe and the Mediterranean from 1250 to 1550. By foregrounding gender as an organizing principle of healthcare, the contributors challenge traditional binaries that ahistorically separate care from cure, medicine from religion, and domestic healing from fee-for-service medical exchanges. The essays collected here illuminate previously hidden and undervalued forms of healthcare and varieties of body knowledge produced and transmitted outside the traditional settings of university, guild, and academy. They draw on non-traditional sources – vernacular regimens, oral communications, religious and legal sources, images and objects – to reveal additional locations for producing body knowledge in households, religious communities, hospices, and public markets. Emphasizing cross-confessional and multilinguistic exchange, the essays also reveal the multiple pathways for knowledge transfer in these centuries. Gender, Health, and Healing, 1250-1550 provides a synoptic view of how gender and cross-cultural exchange shaped medical theory and practice in later medieval and Renaissance societies.
Sara Ritchey is Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the author of Holy Matter: Changing Perceptions of the Material World in Late Medieval Christianity (2014) and a forthcoming book on late medieval religious women’s therapeutic knowledge and healthcare practices (2021).
Sharon Strocchia is Professor of History at Emory University in Atlanta. A social and cultural historian of Renaissance Italy, she has published widely on women, religion, and health-related topics. Her most recent book is Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy (2019).
Women and Healthcare in Early Modern Europe is a special issue of Renaissance Studies. (Vol. 28, no. 4, September 2014; Guest editor: Sharon T. Strocchia). This collection of essays by an international team of scholars brings fresh interpretive perspectives and impressive archival research to bear on the reappraisal of women’s medical activities in early modern Europe. Spanning England and the continent from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the collection situates female practitioners not on the margins of medical practice but rather at the nexus of household medicine, emerging structures of public health, and the production of medical knowledge. The essays demonstrate how increased demand for healthcare services in the early modern period opened new opportunities for women’s participation in a variety of health-related activities, from pharmacy and ‘physick’ to the provision of care. Drawing on a wide range of sources—court records, letters, inventories, printed herbals, parish account books, physicians’ journals, proceedings of state health boards—the collection showcases how innovative public health initiatives capitalized on domestic medical skills and probes sites of knowledge production and exchange outside university and guild settings. Whether spotlighting local artisans and noblewomen who worked without formal compensation or ‘expert’ practitioners who purveyed their skills in the marketplace, the essays cast new light on women’s claims to medical expertise and their self-perception as healers. Taking up issues of importance for Renaissance scholars working across the disciplines, this collection re-orients our understanding of how healthcare was organized, practiced and gendered in early modern Europe.
Table of Contents:
• Sharon T. Strocchia, Introduction: Women and Healthcare in Early Modern Europe
• Debra Blumenthal, Domestic Medicine: Slaves, Servants, and Female Medical Expertise in Late Medieval Valencia
• Alisha Rankin, Exotic Materials and Treasured Knowledge: The Valuable Legacy of Noblewomen’s Remedies in Early Modern Germany
• Elaine Leong, ‘Herbals she peruseth’: Reading Medicine in Early Modern England
• Richelle Munkhoff, Poor Women and Parish Public Health in Sixteenth-Century London
• Jane Stevens Crawshaw, Families, Medical Secrets and Public Health in Early Modern Venice
• Annemarie Kinzelbach, Women and Healthcare in Early Modern German Towns
The articles by Leong and Stevens Crawshaw are available open access, and plans are underway to make the editor's Introduction open access in the near future.
https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/nuns-and-nunneries-renaissance-florence
The 15th century was a time of dramatic and decisive change for nuns and nunneries in Florence. In the course of that century, the city’s convents evolved from small, semiautonomous communities to large civic institutions. By 1552, roughly one in eight Florentine women lived in a religious community. Historian Sharon T. Strocchia analyzes this stunning growth of female monasticism, revealing the important roles these women and institutions played in the social, economic, and political history of Renaissance Florence.
It became common practice during this time for unmarried women in elite society to enter convents. This unprecedented concentration of highly educated and well-connected women transformed convents into sites of great patronage and social and political influence. As their economic influence also grew, convents found new ways of supporting themselves; they established schools, produced manuscripts, and manufactured textiles.
Strocchia has mined previously untapped archival materials to uncover how convents shaped one of the principal cities of Renaissance Europe. She demonstrates the importance of nuns and nunneries to the booming Florentine textile industry and shows the contributions that ordinary nuns made to Florentine life in their roles as scribes, stewards, artisans, teachers, and community leaders. In doing so, Strocchia argues that the ideals and institutions that defined Florence were influenced in great part by the city’s powerful female monastics.
Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence shows for the first time how religious women effected broad historical change and helped write the grand narrative of medieval and Renaissance Europe. The book is a valuable text for students and scholars in early modern European history, religion, women’s studies, and economic history.
Table Of Contents
List of Tables, Graphs, and Figures
Preface
1. The Growth of Florentine Convents
Convents in Crisis
The Midcentury Resurgence
The Rush to the Convent
2. Nuns, Neighbors, and Kinsmen
From Neighborhood Enclaves to Citywide Institutions
Property and the Topography of Power
Defenders of the Parish
3. The Renaissance Convent Economy
The Structure of Convent Finance
The Paradox of ''Private'' Wealth
Balancing the Budget
The Medici and the Monte
4. Invisible Hands: Renaissance Nuns at Work
Economic Strategies and Opportunities
The Century of Silk: Nuns and Textile Production
Three Case Studies in Textile Work
Books and Educational Activities
5. Contesting the Boundaries of Enclosure
The Practice of Open Reclusion, 1300–1450
Privatization, Enclosure, and Reform, 1430–1500
The Florentine ''Night Officers''
Ecclesiastical Reform Initiatives, 1500–1540
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Mapping Space, Sense, and Movement in Florence explores the potential of digital mapping or Historical GIS as a research and teaching tool to enable researchers and students to uncover the spatial, kinetic and sensory dimensions of the early modern city.
The exploration focuses on new digital research and mapping projects that engage the rich social, cultural, and artistic life of Florence in particular. One is a new GIS tool known as DECIMA, (Digitally-Encoded Census Information and Mapping Archive), and the other is a smartphone app called Hidden Florence. The international collaborators who have helped build these and other projects address three questions: how such projects can be created when there are typically fewer sources than for modern cities; how they facilitate more collaborative models for historical research into social relations, senses, and emotions; and how they help us interrogate older historical interpretations and create new models of analysis and communication. Four authors examine technical issues around the software programs and manuscripts. Five then describe how GIS can be used to advance and develop existing research projects. Finally, four authors look to the future and consider how digital mapping transforms the communication of research results, and makes it possible to envision new directions in research.
This exciting new volume is illustrated throughout with maps, screenshots and diagrams to show the projects at work. It will be essential reading for students and scholars of early modern Italy, the Renaissance and digital humanities.