"English translation of letters by a woman pharmacist, a grocer's daughter and pharmacist's wife, active in the scientific milieu of Padua, in which is proposed a materialist explanation of Noah's flood that prompts an accusation of heresy. Accompanying her own letters are letters to her and a legal brief in her defense"--

The era of the Scientific Revolution has long been epitomized by Galileo. Yet many women were at its vanguard, deeply invested in empirical culture. They experimented with medicine and practical alchemy at home, at court, and through collaborative networks of practitioners. In academies, salons, and correspondence, they debated cosmological discoveries; in their literary production, they used their knowledge of natural philosophy to argue for their intellectual equality to men. Meredith Ray restores the work of these women to our understanding of early modern scientific culture. Her study begins with Caterina Sforza’s alchemical recipes; examines the sixteenth-century vogue for “books of secrets”; and looks at narratives of science in works by Moderata Fonte and Lucrezia Marinella. It concludes with Camilla Erculiani’s letters on natural philosophy and, finally, Margherita Sarrocchi’s defense of Galileo’s “Medicean” stars. Combining literary and cultural analysis, Daughters of Alchemy contributes to the emerging scholarship on the variegated nature of scientific practice in the early modern era. Drawing on a range of under-studied material including new analyses of the Sarrocchi–Galileo correspondence and a previously unavailable manuscript of Sforza’s Experimenti, Ray’s book rethinks early modern science, properly reintroducing the integral and essential work of women.

• This book offers an engaging, well-researched introduction to the influential female figures who helped lay the foundations of Renaissance culture, making it easy for educators to integrate women’s history into the study of the past and for the general reader to gain a reliable, richly detailed overview. • Each chapter functions as a stand-alone study, combining an engaging narrative biography with an expert grasp of the cultural, political, and artistic context of this historical period to allow students and lecturers to either use parts or the whole of this book to support their studies and teaching. • Taken as a whole, students will be shown that these women were not isolated cases of female exceptionality, but rather a part of a larger and more complex tapestry of Renaissance achievement, one that connects them to one another as well as to the male writers, artists, and leaders whose names many readers will already know. • Interwoven within each chapter are primary sources (letters, poems, sketches) and portraits of each of the women discussed, providing students with a fuller picture of these women.

This book sheds light on the originality and historical significance of women’s philosophical, moral, political and scientific ideas in Italy and early modern Europe. Divided into three sections, it starts by discussing the women philosophers’ engagement with the classical inheritance with regard to the works of Moderata Fonte, Tullia d'Aragona and Anne Conway. The next section examines the relationship between women philosophers and the new philosophy of nature, focusing on the connections between female thought and the new seventeenth- and eighteenth-century science, and discussing the work of Camilla Erculiani, Margherita Sarocchi, Margaret Cavendish, Mariangela Ardinghelli, Teresa Ciceri, Candida Lena Perpenti, and Alessandro Volta. The final section presents male philosophers’ perspectives on the role of women, discussing the place of women in the work of Giordano Bruno, Poulain de la Barre and the theories of Hobbes and Rawls. By exploring these women philosophers, writers and translators, the book offers a re-examination of the early modern thinking of and about women in Italy.

Gives accurate and reliable summaries of the current state of research. It includes entries on philosophers, problems, terms, historical periods, subjects and the cultural context of Renaissance Philosophy. Furthermore, it covers Latin, Arabic, Jewish, Byzantine and vernacular philosophy, and includes entries on the cross-fertilization of these philosophical traditions. A unique feature of this encyclopedia is that it does not aim to define what Renaissance philosophy is, rather simply to cover the philosophy of the period between 1300 and 1650.

The Routledge Handbook of Women and Early Modern European Philosophy is an outstanding reference source for the wide range of philosophical contributions made by women writing in Europe from about 1560 to 1780. It shows the range of genres and methods used by women writing in these centuries in Europe, thus encouraging an expanded understanding of our historical canon. Comprising 46 chapters by a team of contributors from all over the globe, including early career researchers, the Handbook is divided into the following sections: I. Context II. Themes A. Metaphysics and Epistemology B. Natural Philosophy C. Moral Philosophy D. Social-Political Philosophy III. Figures IV. State of the Field The volume is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy who are interested in expanding their understanding of the richness of our philosophical past, including in order to offer expanded, more inclusive syllabi for their students. It is also a valuable resource for those in related fields like gender and women’s studies; history; literature; sociology; history and philosophy of science; and political science.

This open access book explores knowledge practices by five women from different European contexts. Contributors document, analyze, and discuss how women employed practices of privacy to pursue knowledge that did not necessarily conform with the curriculum prescribed for them. The practices of Jane Lumley in England, Camila Herculiana in Padua, Victorine de Chastenay in Paris, as well as Elisabeth Sophie Marie and Philippine Charlotte in Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, will help us to exemplify the delicate balance between audacity and obedience that women had to employ to be able to explore science, literature, philosophy, theology, and other types of learned activities. Cases range from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, presenting continuities and discontinuities across temporal and geographical lines of the strategies that women used to protect their knowledge production and retain intact their reputations as good Christian daughters, wives, and mothers. Taken together, the essays show how having access to privacy—the ability to regulate access to themselves while studying and learning—was a crucial condition for the success of the knowledge activities these women pursued. This is an open access book.