Learn More You will find below other works by me that were published on other websites.Feel free to share if you like them! The Mother of All Things: Reshaping Medical Knowledge in Translation If you lived in the sixteenth century and you fell ill, who would you call to treat you? Maybe an expensive university-trained physician, if you had the means to pay them, or a reliable surgeon if you were less wealthy? How would you feel about calling your local herb woman, who was probably illiterate? Perhaps surprisingly, that’s exactly what the Bolognese surgeon Leonardo Fioravanti (1517-1588) would advise. Yet when his texts were translated, these women were written out of the books, illustrating the erasure of women from the historical record. ‘A Few Drops of Milk Will Do’: Breast Milk as Medicine ” A few weeks after my baby was born, I noticed her tear ducts were blocked. Echoing Galen, the midwife suggested a few drops of breast milk to help treat and open the ducts. A few days later, the problem was solved, much to my astonishment … “ Flowers Flowers conjure up spring and rebirth, youth, beauty, freshness, and the fecundity of the natural world. In the early modern period, these associations could also apply to the female body. In printed recipe books, a best-selling genre of domestic guides, readers could find many recipes about flowers. Kitchen Alchemy in the 16th Century Since late antiquity, alchemical texts have had a reputation for being difficult to read. Besides often being written in Latin, which automatically limited the readership, these treatises employed a hermetic language, following the tradition of the secrecy of esoteric knowledge. From Dificio di ricette to Bâtiment des recettes: The Afterlife of Italian Secrets in France In 1525 a book called Opera nuova intitolata dificio di ricette was published in Venice. The book promised to reveal all kinds of secrets to the reader, from cosmetic to medical recipes.
