Sandra Cavallo
My long-lasting fields of research are the history of medicine and that of gender and the family. Although my research mainly focuses on 16th and 17th-century Italy my findings are always discussed in a broader European context. I have also written on these themes in a wider comparative perspective, editing volumes about widowhood, medicine, and childhood and the family in Europe and Europe and its colonies.
In the first phase of my career I researched and wrote extensively on the history of poor-relief, formal and informal, and on charitable and medical institutions. Later, I explored the social and professional profile of the early modern barber-surgeon, and published the monograph Artisans of the Body in early modern Italy (2007, pb 2010).
Another strand of my research concerns themes related to home life and gender, and lately the home as a principal site for the management of health and for medical care.
The project which led to the publication of the award winning monograph Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy (2013) brings together my interests in medicine, domestic culture, space and objects. The complementary co-edited volume Conserving Health in Early Modern Culture (2017) explores in a comparative perspective the role of preventive concerns in early modern health culture.
My most recent work focuses on medical practice, and therapies in particular.
Address: History Department
Royal Holloway
Egham, Surrey TW20 OEX
UK
In the first phase of my career I researched and wrote extensively on the history of poor-relief, formal and informal, and on charitable and medical institutions. Later, I explored the social and professional profile of the early modern barber-surgeon, and published the monograph Artisans of the Body in early modern Italy (2007, pb 2010).
Another strand of my research concerns themes related to home life and gender, and lately the home as a principal site for the management of health and for medical care.
The project which led to the publication of the award winning monograph Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy (2013) brings together my interests in medicine, domestic culture, space and objects. The complementary co-edited volume Conserving Health in Early Modern Culture (2017) explores in a comparative perspective the role of preventive concerns in early modern health culture.
My most recent work focuses on medical practice, and therapies in particular.
Address: History Department
Royal Holloway
Egham, Surrey TW20 OEX
UK
less
InterestsView All (18)
Uploads
Papers by Sandra Cavallo
It shows that, in spite of the almost exclusive focus on recipe books in recent scholarship, the composition of this literature was much more varied and regimens of health, food regimens, books about the medicinal properties of naturalia, and compendia of medical information of various kinds (diagnostic, preventative and therapeutic) matched and sometimes exceeded the fortune of recipe books. It then goes on to ask what made some vernacular medical advice books particularly appealing to a wide non-professional and non-Latinate audience, while apparently similar publications attracted little interest. To this end it pays unprecedented attention to the full range of elements that determined the appeal of a book: its physical and typographical features, its contents and implicit functions, its author, patron, publisher and geographical reach.
The focus on objects and the ways in which they were understood, produced and used contributes significantly to reformulate categories and assumptions in the history of early modern medicine that are still reflected in museum displays. It leads in particular to question the tendency to distinguish medical from religious/magical objects, to separate popular from learned medicine, and to portray the production of natural and medical knowledge as an elite occupation, confined to the professionals and the learned members of the ‘republic of letters.’ Instead, studying objects suggests that the less-educated and socially disadvantaged participated broadly in the new culture of the body and the natural world. They were informers and collectors of specimens, producers of health-significant artefacts; but also recipients of anatomical displays, and consumers of medically-efficacious images and amulets. Meanwhile, in the home, domestic furnishings were increasingly attributed a role in health maintenance. The study of material culture broadens considerably, therefore, our understanding of what is medicine and who makes it in the early modern period.
ABSTRACT: The essay offers a dynamic picture of household medicine over time, arguing that its role expanded in the early modern period. It explores the changing relationship between lay and professional, domestic and commercial medicine and highlights the contextual factors that impressed new directions to these sets of relationships. Furthermore, it stresses the significance of geographical variation in these practices. Paying special attention to the still under-investigated Italian case, it highlights its distinctive traits when contrasted with the better studied cases of England and Germany. The view from Italy also offers new elements to re-consider the role of gender in domestic medicine.
Sections:
Why was domestic medicine so common? Professional versus domestic medicine? The expanding role of domestic medicine. Household medicine: a profitable affair? Gender and household medicine. Reproductive knowledge and infant care. Conclusion
Two major architectural developments are said to characterise the residential palace in Baroque Italy: the separation of public from private areas of the building and the creation of separate, and allegedly symmetrical apartments for its male and female inhabitants within the latter. It is normally assumed that spatial practice was shaped by these divisions and that men and women enjoyed equal levels of seclusion and privacy in their quarters. Yet, if we turn to sources that reveal minute details of everyday domestic life, such as family letters, a much more complex picture emerges. Focusing on the Spada residence in Rome in the mid decades of the 17th century, this paper suggests that female inhabitants of the palace could aspire to very little privacy by comparison with their male counterparts. This was due to the tasks that women performed in service of the household and to their maternal roles but also to intrinsically hierarchical assumptions about genders which made female space much more open to intrusion than male one. In spite of the concerns for sexual honour and modesty that pervades the architects' discourse, in actual facts gender segregation worked for men, not for women. The calendar of renovation works that transformed the look and design of the palace also shows that women's pleas for a better quality space were repeatedly ignored in favour of other logics so that, far from being equivalent, female apartments were systematically more cramped, noisy, darker and unhealthy than male ones.
of their living father and hence from any economic obligations to his family. The analysis of a sample of over a hundred deeds from the last quarter of the 17th century reveals that emancipations were particularly frequent among those urban classes which largely lived of their work and participated in the labour market from an early age. The arguments used by sons to justify their request for emancipation throw light on the specific nature of the father-son relationship among these groups. Fathers are often portrayed as too poor to comply with the duty of settling all male children in a trade and paying for the dowries of the daughters, and as obliged to rely on older sons to fullfil these essential paternal and masculine roles. They are implicitly depicted as failed patriarchs and their legal prerogatives over the son thus appear illegitimate. The analysis of these narratives, together with a brief examination of representations of fatherhood in earlier artisans’ diaries, exposes the gulf between shared expectations about fatherly roles and practice that made the position of the paternal figure particularly vulnerable among the non-propertied classes. Here paternal roles were often shared by a range of male figures, rather than being entirely fullfiled by the biological father. Tensions or simply emotional and physical distance characterised the father-son relationship, in sheer contrast with the rhetoric of the time, which depicted such bond as ‘the greatest love there is’.
It shows that, in spite of the almost exclusive focus on recipe books in recent scholarship, the composition of this literature was much more varied and regimens of health, food regimens, books about the medicinal properties of naturalia, and compendia of medical information of various kinds (diagnostic, preventative and therapeutic) matched and sometimes exceeded the fortune of recipe books. It then goes on to ask what made some vernacular medical advice books particularly appealing to a wide non-professional and non-Latinate audience, while apparently similar publications attracted little interest. To this end it pays unprecedented attention to the full range of elements that determined the appeal of a book: its physical and typographical features, its contents and implicit functions, its author, patron, publisher and geographical reach.
The focus on objects and the ways in which they were understood, produced and used contributes significantly to reformulate categories and assumptions in the history of early modern medicine that are still reflected in museum displays. It leads in particular to question the tendency to distinguish medical from religious/magical objects, to separate popular from learned medicine, and to portray the production of natural and medical knowledge as an elite occupation, confined to the professionals and the learned members of the ‘republic of letters.’ Instead, studying objects suggests that the less-educated and socially disadvantaged participated broadly in the new culture of the body and the natural world. They were informers and collectors of specimens, producers of health-significant artefacts; but also recipients of anatomical displays, and consumers of medically-efficacious images and amulets. Meanwhile, in the home, domestic furnishings were increasingly attributed a role in health maintenance. The study of material culture broadens considerably, therefore, our understanding of what is medicine and who makes it in the early modern period.
ABSTRACT: The essay offers a dynamic picture of household medicine over time, arguing that its role expanded in the early modern period. It explores the changing relationship between lay and professional, domestic and commercial medicine and highlights the contextual factors that impressed new directions to these sets of relationships. Furthermore, it stresses the significance of geographical variation in these practices. Paying special attention to the still under-investigated Italian case, it highlights its distinctive traits when contrasted with the better studied cases of England and Germany. The view from Italy also offers new elements to re-consider the role of gender in domestic medicine.
Sections:
Why was domestic medicine so common? Professional versus domestic medicine? The expanding role of domestic medicine. Household medicine: a profitable affair? Gender and household medicine. Reproductive knowledge and infant care. Conclusion
Two major architectural developments are said to characterise the residential palace in Baroque Italy: the separation of public from private areas of the building and the creation of separate, and allegedly symmetrical apartments for its male and female inhabitants within the latter. It is normally assumed that spatial practice was shaped by these divisions and that men and women enjoyed equal levels of seclusion and privacy in their quarters. Yet, if we turn to sources that reveal minute details of everyday domestic life, such as family letters, a much more complex picture emerges. Focusing on the Spada residence in Rome in the mid decades of the 17th century, this paper suggests that female inhabitants of the palace could aspire to very little privacy by comparison with their male counterparts. This was due to the tasks that women performed in service of the household and to their maternal roles but also to intrinsically hierarchical assumptions about genders which made female space much more open to intrusion than male one. In spite of the concerns for sexual honour and modesty that pervades the architects' discourse, in actual facts gender segregation worked for men, not for women. The calendar of renovation works that transformed the look and design of the palace also shows that women's pleas for a better quality space were repeatedly ignored in favour of other logics so that, far from being equivalent, female apartments were systematically more cramped, noisy, darker and unhealthy than male ones.
of their living father and hence from any economic obligations to his family. The analysis of a sample of over a hundred deeds from the last quarter of the 17th century reveals that emancipations were particularly frequent among those urban classes which largely lived of their work and participated in the labour market from an early age. The arguments used by sons to justify their request for emancipation throw light on the specific nature of the father-son relationship among these groups. Fathers are often portrayed as too poor to comply with the duty of settling all male children in a trade and paying for the dowries of the daughters, and as obliged to rely on older sons to fullfil these essential paternal and masculine roles. They are implicitly depicted as failed patriarchs and their legal prerogatives over the son thus appear illegitimate. The analysis of these narratives, together with a brief examination of representations of fatherhood in earlier artisans’ diaries, exposes the gulf between shared expectations about fatherly roles and practice that made the position of the paternal figure particularly vulnerable among the non-propertied classes. Here paternal roles were often shared by a range of male figures, rather than being entirely fullfiled by the biological father. Tensions or simply emotional and physical distance characterised the father-son relationship, in sheer contrast with the rhetoric of the time, which depicted such bond as ‘the greatest love there is’.
These contextual factors are discussed in the first two chapters of the book, which is then is organised into six main chapters which reflect the main health concerns: Air, Exercise, Sleep, Food and Drink, Managing the Emotions, and Bodily Hygiene, preceded by a chapter on the print and on .
The volume is richly illustrated, and offers an accessible but fascinating glimpse into both the domestic lives and health preoccupations of early modern Italians.
Through specific case studies, contributors reassess the validity of the categories 'domestic' and 'institutional' and of the oppositions private public, communal individual, religious profane applied to institutional spaces and objects. They consider how rituals, interior decorations, furnishings and images were transferred from the domestic to the institutional interior and vice versa, but also the creative ways in which the residents participated in the formation of their living settings. A variety of secular and religious institutions are considered: hospitals, asylums and orphanages, convents, colleges, public palaces of the ducal and papal court.
The interest and novelty of this collection resides in both its subject matter and its interdisciplinary and Europe-wide dimension. The theme is addressed from the perspective of art history, architectural history, and social, gender and cultural history. Chapters deal with Italy, Britain, the Netherlands, Flanders and Portugal and with both Protestant and Catholic settings. The wide range of evidence employed by contributors includes sources – such as graffiti, lottery tickets or garland pictures – that have rarely if ever been considered by historians.
Through specific case studies, contributors reassess the validity of the categories 'domestic' and 'institutional' and of the oppositions private public, communal individual, religious profane applied to institutional spaces and objects. They consider how rituals, interior decorations, furnishings and images were transferred from the domestic to the institutional interior and vice versa, but also the creative ways in which the residents participated in the formation of their living settings. A variety of secular and religious institutions are considered: hospitals, asylums and orphanages, convents, colleges, public palaces of the ducal and papal court.
The interest and novelty of this collection resides in both its subject matter and its interdisciplinary and Europe-wide dimension. The theme is addressed from the perspective of art history, architectural history, and social, gender and cultural history. Chapters deal with Italy, Britain, the Netherlands, Flanders and Portugal and with both Protestant and Catholic settings. The wide range of evidence employed by contributors includes sources – such as graffiti, lottery tickets or garland pictures – that have rarely if ever been considered by historians.