Project description
Renaissance women’s role in bathing practices
In Renaissance Italy, women played crucial yet overlooked roles in the realm of baths and medical practices. While Renaissance scholarship has focused on women as art patrons, their influence in the realm of bathing has been neglected. With the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the WomenAndTheBaths project seeks to rectify this oversight. Led by experts in ancient balneology, the project will delve into primary sources, including unpublished letters, to explore how women shaped bathing practices. The project aims to reveal their significant impact on medical knowledge dissemination in Renaissance Italy. The findings will shed light on the connections between women’s agency, medical practices and societal norms of the time.
Objective
Despite the growing interest in womens contribution to texts, works of art, and cultural strata of society during the Renaissance, research has focused disproportionately on their roles as patrons, purchasers, and creators of art. Less attention has been paid to the connections between womens agency and one of the most popular medical practices of the time: bathing. Baths and daily exercise were recognised as an essential part of the health routine of the ancients, and this routine was revived by early modern physicians and prescribed for all sorts of ailments. Yet, recent works on baths in Renaissance Italy dedicate only a few paragraphs to women within broader discussions of aristocratic bathing practices. This project will re-evaluate womens experience of baths in Renaissance Italy, revealing their prominent role as consumers and patrons of balneological treatises as well as users of spas. It will also highlight how womens influence spurred physicians to mine ancient medical texts in search of gender-specific medical knowledge, an exceptional innovation, especially if one considers the widespread gender bias still affecting medical curricula today.
Building on my postdoctoral research on ancient balneology and its reception, this multidisciplinary project will use a neglected scattered body of primary data, including several letters that will be edited and published for the first time in an open-access database, to construct a picture of how doctors and female patients experiences of bathing were shaped by their readings (Greco-Roman, medieval, and contemporary texts); the establishments they chose (spas, private and public baths); and contemporary moral bias. Through this investigation, I will address broader questions concerning the nature and extent of physician-patient networks in Renaissance Italy and womens agency in disseminating medical knowledge.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2023-PF-01
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30123 Venezia
Italy
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