Sharon T. Strocchia

Sharon T. Strocchia, Professor, (B.A., Stanford University; M.A., Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley); social and cultural history of Renaissance Italy, with a focus on women and religion in Florence; gender and sexuality in early modern Europe; social history of medicine in premodern Europe. Author of Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence (1992) and Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence (2009).

My recently published book, Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), shows how religious women and institutions helped constitute the social and political world of late medieval and Renaissance Florence from circa 1350 to 1550. During this period, Florentine convents were transformed from small, semi-autonomous communities into large civic institutions serving family, state and society. Based on extensive archival research, my book explains how and why this transformation happened, and probes its impact on the thousands of women living in religious houses. For more information, click here.

Building on this foundation, I recently began work on a new book project titled Nuns and the Healing Arts in Late Renaissance Italy (1500-1650). This study analyzes the contributions religious women made to the Italian urban healthcare system as apothecaries, nurses, hospital administrators, and spiritual healers, as well as their subjective responses to illness and disability. Because Italian convents and their affiliates kept exceptional records—account books, chronicles, necrologies, letters, even individual medical prescriptions—these institutions provide copious evidence for assessing women’s medical activities and illness experiences in early modern Europe. By recuperating nuns’ medical agency and evaluating their experiences as sufferers in relation to signature developments of the period, especially state formation, Catholic reform, and medical professionalization, my project revises current understandings of early modern Italian medical practice and advances the historical study of women’s health. The project also affords fresh perspectives on the gendering of early modern medicine and on early modern Catholicism.

Read and listen to Sharon Strocchia talk about her new book "Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence"

Curriculum Vitae