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History
Sharon T. Strocchia
Associate Professor of History
Abstract: During the funding period running from 18 September to 18 December 2007, I began archival research in Florence, Italy on a new, book-length project tentatively titled Nuns, Health, and the Healing Arts in Late Renaissance Italy (1500-1650). The project consists of several linked essays that examine issues of health and disability among the thousands of religious women living in Italian urban convents, as well as their role in the healing arts, primarily as apothecaries and spiritual healers. By setting nuns’ health and medical agency within their shifting frames of reference—the growth of the state, Counter-Reformation piety, the rise of professional medicine—my study simultaneously advances the historical study of women’s health, still in its infancy; recovers an important but unrecognized network of healers broadly available to a lay public; and articulates deepening tensions in the framing assumptions and medical practices used to explain and treat illness in early modern Europe.
Results: In Florence, I concentrated research at five archives and libraries: the State Archive (Archivio di Stato), National Library (Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale), and the Arciepiscopal Archive (Archivio Arcivescovile), which house an array of Renaissance manuscripts; and the German Art Historical Institute (Kunsthistorisches Institut) and the Institute for the History of Science (Istituto di Storia della Scienza), both principal repositories of secondary materials and reference works treating Italian social history, convent architecture and decorative arts, and the history of science and medicine. Research at the Archivio di Stato, primarily in the manuscript collections of now-suppressed convents (Corporazioni Religiose Soppresse dal Governo Francese), the state magistracy supervising ecclesiastical institutions (Auditore dei Benefici Ecclesiastici), and the city’s main hospital (Ospedale di S. Maria Nuova) proved extremely fruitful. I identified at least four commercial convent pharmacies in sixteenth-century Florence staffed by trained nuns who sold remedies to the public, including what appears to be the earliest known female-run commercial apothecary shop in Europe. Within the limitations of the sources, I reconstructed the origins of these shops, their internal organization, medical wares, suppliers and clientele. I also probed aspects of their relations with the Medici dukes, Florentine archbishops, and the local College of Physicians (Collegio de’ Medici) charged with licensing apothecaries from the 1550s onward. Manuscript sources conserved in the National Library enabled me to add valuable biographical information about several of the most prominent nun-apothecaries serving the laity of late Renaissance Florence.
I will present the first fruits of this work in April 2008 at the Renaissance Society of America meeting in Chicago in a session I organized on “Gender and Medicine in Renaissance Italy.” By the end of summer 2008, I anticipate completing an article analyzing the significance of Tuscan convent pharmacies within a pluralistic medical landscape that nevertheless was increasingly subject to professionalization, state control, and the particular constraints of enclosure. An expanded version of this piece will be included in my projected volume of essays.
Another topic on which I made significant headway was the mood disorder called “melancholy,” a widespread, fashionable Renaissance illness that posed special challenges to communal life. Although considerable research remains, I mapped out several case studies of nuns chronically afflicted by “melancholic humors,” using descriptive letters and petitions, diplomatic reports of renowned cases, convent account books, convent necrologies, and pastoral treatises on convent governance. These stories provide insight into the medicalization of melancholy, even by ecclesiastical officials, while documenting how the gendered nature of this disorder afforded religious women certain forms of agency. I hope to present my findings about “the melancholic nun” at two conferences in spring 2009 before expanding and revising this piece for inclusion in the projected volume.
Other areas where I gathered crucial evidence include changing relations between nuns and their physicians in response to compulsory enclosure after the Council of Trent (1545-63); medical “recipes” and other treatments prescribed specifically for religious women; and nuns’ care giving roles in the local Florentine incurabili hospital for the insane suffering from tertiary syphilis (est. 1542). At this point, I am unsure whether the evidence will be sufficiently rich to write stand-alone essays on these topics. Nevertheless, this research will undoubtedly figure into one or several of the projected essays, with subsequent explorations supplementing my initial findings.
In sum, my three-month research trip to Florence netted a wealth of material that successfully launched a major new project. I will be delighted to acknowledge support received from an ICIS Faculty International Research Grant in forthcoming papers and publications.