Introduction

We are very pleased to include in this issue an expanded version of the keynote address presented by Mary D. Garrard at the “Early Modern Women: New Perspectives,” Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque Conference held at the University of Miami in February, 2013. This article juxtaposes Florentine public art produced by male artists such as Michelangelo and Cellini with the representation of women’s emotive power in Suor Platella Nelli’s Lamentation. Through her portrayal of the mourning women, Nelli mounts an effective challenge to the masculinist values prevalent in the statuary exhibited in early modern Florence.

The articles that follow cover a breadth of topics on several aspects of women’s lives, including kinship and politics, education and literacy, and science and medicine, which is the focus of this issue’s Forum. Catherine Ferrari examines the familial impediments to Giovanna d’Austria’s attempts to gain power and establish patronage networks at the Medici court. Despite the contradictory demands of her natal and marital families, the grand duchess ultimately succeeded by aligning closely with her husband and his dynasty.

Education and literacy among Judeo-conversas in Spain and Portugal, and Sephardic women of Amsterdam, are the subjects of Sara Nalle’s investigation. Her findings from Inquisition trials in Spain and Portugal indicate that Judeo-conversas placed an elevated premium on education. These women—even artisans and shopkeepers—achieved a surprisingly high level of literacy that exceeded the general level of literacy among Iberian women.

Historians of science have increasingly come to understand the multiplicity of sites in which scientific knowledge is produced. Katherine Allen examines one of these locations—the homes of elite English women, where they contributed significantly to the history of distillation as an experimental and intellectual practice. Allen’s article draws extensively on manuscript recipe collections and technical guides, and even manuscript marginalia in a printed book.

The investigation of women’s involvement in science is the subject of this issue’s Forum. In the opening article, Nina Gelbart provides an expansive overview of the historiography of women in science across the globe, although focusing on the Atlantic world, an area that has been studied most extensively. Here she covers the colonies in North and South America, before returning us to Europe to provide a detailed discussion of six important women scientists in France.

Margaret Cavendish has long been recognized as one of the first English women of science in the early modern period. Anne Thell deals with the various ways that Cavendish’s later natural philosophy appears in her literary works, in particular the figure of the “Lady Phoenix” as an image of natural change. The significance of scientific collecting has drawn the attention of the scholars of science as an important aspect of the scientific revolution. Mary Trye, though not as well known today as Cavendish, was a notable practitioner and promoter of chemical medicine, a new and progressive practice in late seventeenth-century England. Sara Read demonstrates how Trye built on her father’s legacy to pursue a practice of her own in a field dominated by men.

Although women’s ability to deal with natural objects in a “rational” manner has often been questioned, Margaret Carlyle demonstrates that numerous French women in eighteenth-century Paris assembled, organized, and exhibited major scientific collections considered fully the equal of more famous collections by men. Paloma Moral de Calatrava investigates women’s participation as midwives in late eighteenth-century Spain, noting the obstacles they faced from the male medical establishment. She presents the intriguing case of a midwife who petitioned the king of Spain for permission to advertise her skills in preventing miscarriages and in removing retained placentae. The process of her several appeals to the king, after their denial by Spain’s College of Royal Physicians, reveals an exceptional record of female resistance.

Although most studies of hysteria have focused on the nineteenth century, Heather Meek directs our attention to a century earlier, when several women writers both reinforced and reformulated understandings of hysteria. Meek discovers that these women often rejected physiological and gendered dimensions of the condition by emphasizing psychological symptoms. Physics and mathematics were the fields in which women...