Panaceia’s Daughters: Noblewomen As Healers in Early Modern Germany by Alisha Michelle Rankin (review)

Focusing on the German lands in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, Alicia Rankin’s Panaceia’s Daughters: Noblewomen As Healers in Early Modern Germany is an important new book on the Protestant Reformation. Rankin explores the world of elite noble medical women, examining their medical networks; analyzing their compilation of existing medical recipes and the development of new ones; and, in the case of Elisabeth of Rochlitz, charting their experiences as patients. The author moves from the general 16^th-century medical milieu in the first part of the book to the specific experiences of three women in the second part.

In her introduction, “Pharmacy for Princesses,” Rankin asserts that “throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many hundreds of noblewomen became known locally for their healing, and a few, like Dorothea [of Mansfeld], gained reputations that stretched far beyond the borders of their own lands” (3). Rankin’s focus in second part of her monograph is on three of the noblewomen that fit into the latter group. The “women” part of “noblewomen” is crucial to her study: “This book contends that noblewomen became fêted as healers not in spite of their gender, but because of it” (3, italics in original). Rankin works to revise the long-held assumptions of historians such as Merry Wiesner-Hanks by questioning the restrictions placed upon “women’s work, including medical work” in the late medieval and early modern periods (6). The author also accurately notes that her study “represents the first in-depth attempt to situate elite women’s healing within the wider context of early modern medical culture,” a task that she especially takes up in the first part of the book, entitled “Contexts” (17). The source base for the book includes medical recipes, letters, and medical inventories.

In the first chapter, “Noble Empirics,” Rankin traces some of the courtly networks active in the 16^th-century German lands, examining the roles of noblewomen within these networks and exploring how medical empiricism developed in these circuits. The book makes the argument that medical communities, strengthened and made more sophisticated through the circulation of healing knowledge around these networks, began to value observation to an extent not seen before the 16^th century as being central to the practice of effective healing. Rankin also makes the important point that “women of all walks of life made medicinal remedies in early modern Europe, from farmers’ wives to patricians to artisans’ spouses”–a point that cannot be overemphasized for understanding early modern medicine (28). In addition, the author emphasizes the centrality of the Frauenzimmer (“ladies’ room”) as the space where noblewomen developed recipes and produced medical innovations.

Medical communities were linked by epistolary networks, and, indeed, letters are a central source for Rankin’s study. These epistolary networks were strengthened through politically opportune marriages between elite aristocratic German families during the early modern period. In noblewomen’s letters and in their other writings about medicine and healing, the deployment of the idea of “experience” was meant to serve as proof that these women knew what they were doing. Gender, Rankin contends, was not the chief determinant in trusting an individual’s “claims of experience” (59). This discussion also suggests a broader trend–the 16^th century in Europe was the period during which “medical empiricism” began to grow.

The second and final chapter of the first part, entitled “Art Written Down,” focuses on medical recipes. Here, Rankin argues that “the rise of a vibrant vernacular medical culture [took place] in the sixteenth century,” a time during which “recipes only gained in significance” (66). In this chapter, the author also smartly shows the links between the genres of the cookbook (kochbuch) and the medical book (artzneybuch).

The second part of the book takes up three case studies meant to serve as different windows on the 16^th-century German noblewoman’s practice and experience of healing. These three chapters...