Sharon T. Strocchia, Professor (B.A., Stanford University; M.A., Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley); social and cultural history of Renaissance Italy; gender and sexuality in early modern Europe; social history of medicine in premodern Europe. Author of Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence (1992) and Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence (2009), which won the 2010 Marraro Prize awarded by the American Catholic Historical Association for the best book in Italian history.
Currently I’m working on two projects, both of which offer important reappraisals of how gender functioned in the organization and provision of early modern healthcare. The first project, titled Gendering Healthcare in Late Renaissance Italy, is a book-length study examining women as agents of health and healing in Italy from 1500 to 1650. Hard times and new diseases like syphilis ravaged sixteenth-century Italian cities, increasing demand for medical care and diverse charitable services. Much of this demand was met by female religious and laywomen, who served the urban public as skilled apothecaries, nursing staff, hospital administrators, and neighborhood liaisons within increasingly coordinated networks of care. At the same time, changing disease environments and the globalization of the pharmaceutical trade broadened the reach of households, convents and princely courts as nodes of knowledge production operating outside traditional frameworks of university and guild. Focusing on Florence, Venice, Bologna and Rome, I argue that emerging structures of public health, new social welfare projects, and the expansion of pharmacy after 1500 created innovative opportunities for women within the Italian urban healthcare system while enhancing the production and exchange of experiential medical knowledge.
I’m also editing a special issue of Renaissance Studies (forthcoming 2014) that offers fresh perspectives on women’s healthcare activities in early modern Europe. Written by an international team of scholars and drawing on original research, these seven essays challenge conventional notions that women were increasingly marginalized from the European medical arena between 1500 and 1800, and demonstrate instead their centrality to the provision of care and emerging structures of public health across Europe.
Interests
- Social and cultural history of Renaissance Italy
- Women’s history in early modern Europe
- Social history of medicine in the premodern world