CFP: Experiences and Perspectives of Female Patients: Body, Health and Disease across Europe (1450-1750), Trento (Italy), 30.03.2027 - 31.03.2027, Deadline: 30.03.2026
Object: Up to two-day international conference with a view to producing a peer-reviewed special issue with selected papers that will be submitted to the leading academic journal "Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento" / "Jahrbuch des italienisch-deutschen historischen Instituts in Trient". The conference will be the concluding event of the research project titled "The Role of Gender in Medical Care. The Case of the Imperial Habsburg Family (16th–17th Centuries)" (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Project num. 101202043; https://gendmedhab.fbk.eu/).
Location and date: Italy, Italian-German Historical Institute of Trento, 30–31 March 2027.
Organizing committee: Alessandra Quaranta and Elena Taddei.
Subject fields: History of Medicine; History of the Body; Gender Studies; History of Knowledge Transfer; Social, Cultural, and Intellectual History; History of Emotions; Early Modern Europe.
Languages of the conference: English, German, and Italian.
In the last thirty years, the nexus between the social history of medicine and gender studies has often yielded studies on female healers. Inquiries into fascinating figures of female medical agents who operated in the medieval and early modern periods have illuminated their engagement in health care within the domestic context and beyond. By dealing with ill bodies, caring for sick family members, administering remedies, and washing and bandaging sores, women developed manual and technical competences, refined specialist know-how in pharmacy production, and observed the effects of materia medica upon the body. Recent historiography has also stressed that nursing was not an exclusively female terrain, thus recalibrating the roles of men and women in medical assistance within the household. The care of sick children was a shared responsibility between both fathers and mothers, who devoted effort, time, and emotion to sick and dying children, took turns sitting at their bedside, and comforted and kept them calm. Men were also involved in the experimentation of home-made medicines and in the compilation of domestic medical manuscripts that recorded the preparation of medicaments.
By contrast, the roles of women as patients and consumers of medical services have represented an under-researched topic thus far. While most works address this theme in general terms, neglecting a gender perspective, a few significant exceptions have been produced. These reconstruct not only pains and suffering of ill women but also their insights into the body and its mechanisms of healing. Building on this relevant but limited literature, the conference aims to amplify the spectrum of women who were confronted with everyday ailments, serious diseases, and the related therapies, interacting with a variety of (male and female) figures, both specialists and non-specialists, in relation to their health status.
The conference will be the occasion to bring to light a broader spectrum of female patients’ voices. These are hard-to-reach witnesses as the principal historical documents available are male-physician centred sources. Medical treatises and the published collections of medical letters and consultations aimed at enhancing the reputation of the author as practitioner and scholar, tending to obscure, undermine, or counterfeit the opinions of patients in general, and those of women in particular. These works were thus filtered by the pen of the writing physicians and their scholarly discourse. Furthermore, the direct witnesses of female patients, which are contained in family letters or recorded in the context of forensic medicine, have to be used with caution, as the way in which women talked about their health issues depended on different factors and circumstances as well as the self-image that women intended to convey according to the relationship with their interlocutors. Female witnesses were influenced by the discrepancy of social status between the women interrogated and the judges within tribunals, the hierarchical family structure of the early modern period, and the rigid social norms related to the physical and intellectual modesty that women were expected to comply with at that time.
Through an exploration of women’s experiences with and understandings of their own healthy and ill bodies, the conference endeavours to illuminate the roles of female patients within medical visits and their ability to influence their dynamics. Specifically, it scrutinizes women’s attitudes towards the attending physicians, their opinions on diagnoses and therapeutics, and their approaches to the (male) traditional conceptualisations of the body, health, and disease, as well as their emotional responses to illness, recovery, and physicians’ decisions. We are especially keen to refer to a wide range of early modern players and contexts. The investigation extends to a variety of socio-cultural settings—hospitals and charity facilities, municipal health boards, criminal or inquisitorial trials, monastic contexts, noble residences, court environments, literary and artistic circles—and focuses on female voices from the diverse European social strata. A comparison with the male perspective is also encouraged.
We welcome contributions focusing on one or more of the themes outlined below (depending on the historical sources utilized) or exploring analogous subjects:
- Female patients and the medical marketplace: which medical practitioners did women turn to and for what pathologies? What criteria did they adopt in their choices? What disputes, quarrels or tensions between female patients and their healers are attested?
- Cross-gender medical visits: what were the interactions between female patients and the attending male physicians and how did their interplay influence the outcomes of medical visits? Did women agree with the diagnostic assessments and therapeutic approaches of medical specialists and how did they respond to these?
- The relationships between female and male family members in regard to health issues: what importance did men attribute to the health of their female family members and to what extent did men contribute to preserve their good health status? Did fathers, brothers, and husbands seek to prevaricate their female family members in the negotiations with the doctors or, rather, did they encourage women to interact with the attending doctors and express their opinions?
- Women facing difficult childbirths and surgical operations.
- Women’s medical cultures, readings, and understandings of the female body and its pathologies, also in comparison with male medical perspectives or male non-professional standpoints.
- The networks of cultural, religious, and scientific relationships by way of which women apprehended medical notions and developed medical interpretations.
- The manner in which diseases were faced by women belonging to noble and wealthy households, ruling families, the lower classes, or religious orders: what were their emotional responses to illness and treatment? What kind of relationship did women have with their ill or enfeebled body?
- The representations and meanings of female physical or mental/spiritual illness in European literary texts, religious works, and visual arts.
- The consideration of illness in social terms: were ill women penalized or stigmatized and why? Was illness a disadvantage for women in terms of social and/or professional integration?
- The identities of women as healers and patients: relationships, potential overlapping or differences between the two roles.
- The topoi of the women’s physical weakness and their consequent precarious health, as historically produced by traditional male medicine, revisited through a female perspective.
Practical details
We are now inviting proposals for 20-minute-long unpublished papers in English, German, or Italian that address one or more of the themes indicated in our argument description, or similar issues, relating to European territories during the period 1450–1750.
Please send your contribution proposal in a single document, including the following details:
- name, surname, and affiliation of the author
- (provisional) title (and subtitle, if applicable) of the contribution
- abstract of the contribution (maximum 1,500 characters, including spaces)
- 5 keywords
- short bio-note (maximum 10 lines)
Please add your Academic curriculum vitae, including a list of the five most significant publications (maximum one page).
Please send one PDF-file by 30 March 2026 to the following email address: femalepatients@fbk.ue. Our responses will be transmitted by 30 May 2026.
Thank you for considering our invitation, and we look forward to the possibility of welcoming you to our conference.
With best regards,
Alessandra Quaranta and Elena Taddei (aquaranta@fbk.eu; elena.taddei@uibk.ac.at)
