Sharon T. Strocchia

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. Click here for more information on this recent book.

Currently I’m working on two projects, both of which offer important reappraisals of women as healthcare practitioners in the early modern period. The first is a book-length study examining nuns as medical agents and as sufferers in sixteenth-century Italy. Religious women were among the most active agents of health in late Renaissance Italy, when female monasticism reached its peak. Providing vital services as trained apothecaries, skilled nurses, and hospital administrators, they formed an integral part of the Italian urban healthcare system—one that has largely gone unrecognized. Thanks to nuns’ high levels of literacy and penchant for record-keeping, we also can probe their subjective views of illness and disability in unusual depth. By reconsidering nuns’ medical agency and evaluating their experiences as sufferers in relation to signature developments of the period—state formation, Catholic reform, medical professionalization—my book advances the study of women’s health and revises our understanding of how Renaissance health care was organized, practiced, and gendered.  

I’m also editing a special journal issue 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 essays challenge conventional notions that women were increasingly marginalized from the European medical arena between 1500 and 1800, and demonstrate instead their centrality to emerging structures of public health.