ABSTRACT
Scholarship on women in late medieval and early modern science and medicine has gone through a drastic evolution in the last four decades. Until the 1970s, the historiography of this period tended to focus almost exclusively on the activities of a few exceptional men involved in the series of developments frequently termed the Scientific Revolution. Despite a handful of early works engaging with the contributions of women to scientific and medical endeavours, by and large the history of science and medicine left women out altogether. 1 That approach began to change in the 1970s and 1980s, as revisionist works by feminist historians coincided with a general trend in the field away from positivist histories of the inevitable march of scientific progress. The result was, on one hand, new studies of women who were active in scientific and medical endeavours, and, on the other, examinations of philosophical and medical perceptions of gender, women and the female body. While works from the 1970s and 1980s tended to include ambitious and broad studies highlighting the rampant misogyny in early modern science and medicine, recent scholarship has tended more towards close, contextual analyses of specific areas in which women – or ideas about them – made an impact. This chapter provides an overview of all of these historiographical trends.
