Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy by Meredith K. Ray (review)

Halfway through this fascinating book, the author cites from the preface of Camilla Erculiani's 1584 Letters on Natural Philosophy. It is a passage in which Erculiani mentions her fears that her writings would be considered "frivolous and worthless," simply because penned by a woman (120). Sadly, Erculiani's comments were prescient. Even though, as this book shows, she and other women were in fact recognized by many of their contemporaries for their scientific knowledge, bias against them persisted. Subsequently a general "blindness" to women characterized the history of science, although more recently this neglect has been challenged. In this light, the burden of Daughters of Alchemy is not just to recover and evaluate outstanding individual women's contributions to early modern Italian scientific culture, but to broaden our understanding of the various ways in which women more generally participated in the fashioning of that culture.

This book builds very effectively on the approaches taken by historians such as Katharine Park, Paula Findlen, Lorraine Daston, and Carol Pal, in seeking to adjust, and widen, the "lens" of historical scholarship to include hitherto missing women (4). In order to capture the range of women's scientific interests, Ray stresses the breadth of the studies contributing to what was known at the time as "natural philosophy," which included meteorology, geology, astrology, mathematics, medicine, alchemy, and pharmacy. On the one hand, Ray reveals women's familiarity with, and engagement in, scientific culture in a wide variety of social contexts, from humble kitchens to the palaces of the nobility. On the other hand, she examines a broad spectrum of differing textual genres produced by women as evidence of their interest in science—from literary dialogues to epic poetry and published scientific letters. Ray is equally at ease in examining very different kinds of sources, from topics associated with the history of medicine or science, to the examination of epistolary exchanges and literary texts, in order to highlight scientific concerns. The only minor weakness is that occasionally the many threads bearing her arguments through the differing kinds of evidence are woven so densely that the reader may become confused.

Ray builds on, and contributes to, recent scholarship which has identified the domestic sphere as the key space for scientific experimentation and exchange: the place where innumerable men and women independently tried out new ideas and procedures, in their kitchens more often than in laboratories. Central to this experimental culture were the "books of secrets"—manuscript or domestic collections of "recipes"—which included instructions for the production of cosmetics and simple medicines, dyes, soaps, inks, varnishes, and even gunpowder. Far from being a "closed" environment, Ray shows how the domestic sphere overlapped and intersected with the public sphere, as people circulated and shared their knowledge and its physical products (such as medicines, elixirs, and dyes) through letters, as gifts, commercial exchange, in academies and salons, or, through dialogues and epic poems. She repeatedly shows that all this movement transcended boundaries of gender, geography, and even class. In so doing, the book successfully contextualizes the more celebrated scientific world of the seventeenth century by rooting it in an older, broader culture of scientific enquiry that had long been shared between men and women.

The book is structured to take us from the domestic sphere and a single manuscript "book of secrets" in the very early sixteenth century, through to the public sphere with its published scientific tracts and epistolary exchanges between such figures as Margherita Sarrocchi and Galileo in the seventeenth century. Chapter one introduces us to the world of Caterina Sforza (1463–1509), regent of Imola and Forli, and demonstrates the extent to which this powerful woman was also seriously engaged with practical and experimental science on a daily basis in her laboratories and botanical gardens. In her discussion of Caterina's manuscript book of secrets, the Experimenti, to which...