Description
Book SynopsisThis book aims at exploring how practical expertise, textual learning, and the gendered bodies intersected with the production of knowledge in early modern Europe. Gendered touch looks at both how representations of gendered bodies contributed to the production of knowledge, and at how practice itself was gendered. By exploring new archival material and by reading anew printed sources, the book inquiries about how knowledge was produced, translated, appropriated, and transmitted among different kinds of actors – both women and men – such as craftspeople, physicians, alchemists, apothecaries, music theorists, natural philosophers, and natural historians.
Table of ContentsContents List of Figures Notes on Contributors Introduction: Gender, History, and Science in Early Modern Europe Francesca Antonelli and Paolo Savoia Part 1: The Gendered Construction of Textual Traditions: The Case of Maria the Alchemist 1 Maria the Alchemist and Her Famous Heated Bath in the Arabo-Islamic Tradition Lucia Raggetti 2 Maria’s Practica in Early Modern Alchemy Matteo Martelli Part 2: Domestic and Apothecary Workshops: Food and Pharmacy in the Seventeenth Century 3 Cheese-Making and Knowledge-Making: Women’s Expertise and Men’s Explanation Paolo Savoia 4 Making Marmalade and Conserving Fruit within the Architecture of Seventeenth-Century Courtly Entertainment Juliet Claxton 5 Women in Secrets: Medical Inventions between Household, Guilds and Small Scale-Economy Sabrina Minuzzi Part 3: Eighteenth-century Spaces of Gendered Knowledge 6 The “Anonymous Neapolitan”: Faustina Pignatelli and the Bologna Academy of Sciences Paula Findlen 7 Note-taking and Self-promotion: Marie-Anne Paulze-Lavoisier as a Secrétaire (1772–1792) Francesca Antonelli 8 Musical Bodies: Materiality, Gender, and Knowledge in Musical Performance in 18th-century France Amparo Fontaine Postface On Hands, Feelings, and a Nose: Bodies Beyond Gender as Transdisciplinary Tools in Science Paola Govoni Index
