Abstract

Previous scholarship has approached women’s cosmetic practices through the lens provided by misogynist anti–painting satire, with a narrow focus on face painting. Beginning instead with the evidence of women’s manuscript recipe collections, this article argues that cosmetics were part of, and not only antagonistic to, early modern medicine. These manuscripts illustrate a category of knowledge called beautifying physic, evident too in men’s medical receipt collections and herbals. Even cosmetics containing mercury and lead—the ingredients scholars and polemicists alike highlighted as evidence of women’s repudiation of their own health—could be aligned with physic and natural philosophy. Although cosmetics are not without their political vexations, when medicine was a part of women’s household activities, as it was in early modern England, beautifying physic was a domain of knowledge in which women could exercise care for their health, reason in their experiments, and expertise in practices more typically reserved for men.

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