The history of science, the history of women, and gender history – Gendered Touch offers new perspectives on the intersections between the textual and the embodied nature of scientific knowledge in early modern Europe.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction / Francesca Antonelli and Paolo Savoia -- Part One. The Gendered Construction of Textual Traditions: The Case of Maria the Alchemist -- 1. Maria the Alchemist and her Famous Heat Bath in the Arabo-Islamic Tradition Lucia Raggetti -- 2. Maria’s Practica in Early Modern Alchemy / Matteo Martelli -- Part Two. Domestic and Apothecary Workshops: Food and Pharmacy in the Seventeenth Century -- 3. Cheese-making and Knowledge-making: Women’s Expertise and Men’s Explanation / Paolo Savoia -- 4. Making Marmalade and Conserving Fruit within the Architecture of Seventeenth-century Courtly Entertainment / Juliet Claxton -- 5. Women in Secrets: Medical Inventions between Household, Guilds, and Small Scale-Economy / Sabrina Minuzzi -- Part Three. Eighteenth-century Spaces of Gendered knowledge -- 6. The “Anonymous Neapolitan”: Faustina Pignatelli and the Bologna Academy of Sciences / Paula Findlen -- 7. Note-taking and Self-promotion: Marie-Anne Paulze-Lavoisier-Lavoisier as a Secrétaire (1772-1792) / Francesca Antonelli -- 8. Musical Bodies: Materiality, Gender, and Knowledge in Musical Performance in Eighteenth-century France / Amparo Fontaine -- Postface -- On Hands, Feelings, and a Nose: Bodies Beyond Gender as Transdisciplinary Tools in Science / Paola Govoni -- Name Index.

This book aims at exploring how practical expertise, textual learning, and the gendered bodies intersected with the production of knowledge in early modern Europe. Gendered touch looks at both how representations of gendered bodies contributed to the production of knowledge, and at how practice itself was gendered. By exploring new archival material and by reading anew printed sources, the book inquiries about how knowledge was produced, translated, appropriated, and transmitted among different kinds of actors – both women and men – such as craftspeople, physicians, alchemists, apothecaries, music theorists, natural philosophers, and natural historians.

Description based on print version record.