Using unpublished archival sources, this essay analyses the development of convent pharmacies in sixteenth‐century Florence and situates them in a changing medical and political landscape. These female‐run apothecary shops shed light on several important issues for historians of Renaissance medicine and society: the nature and extent of women's medical agency; the acquisition and transmission of specialized knowledge outside a university or guild setting; the regulation of unofficial practitioners by guild and state authorities. By producing and marketing drugs to the public, Renaissance religious women both augmented the medical resources available in Italian urban society and acquired roles of public significance beyond the spiritual realm. I analyse the roots of convent pharmacies in new social welfare initiatives circa 1500, then consider their products, clientele, business practices and methods of training new practitioners. Finally, I ask how convent pharmacies were regulated and why they were protected by early Medici dukes. I argue that Florentine convent pharmacies remained vigorous entities throughout the sixteenth century despite tighter enclosure provisions and professionalizing aspirations, partly because contestations over their status enabled Cosimo I de' Medici and his successors to advance their personal authority within a centralizing state.
In August 1465 Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi, mother of the art patron and builder Filippo Strozzi, arranged for an annual set of masses in the parish church of Santa Maria Ughi. Her purpose, as she said, was to commemorate the souls of “all our dead,” “tutti enostri passati”(sic). In her record of the commission, Alessandra carefully outlined the conditions of the bequest. She noted, for example, the location of the land donation whose proceeds subsidized the masses and the day the ten masses were to be performed, and made alternate arrangements should the priests of Santa Maria Ughi fail to uphold their obligations. Yet within this context of legal specifications and formulae, Alessandra remained curiously vague about one of the program's essential clauses: namely, the precise identity of “all our dead.“
This study examines the widespread practice of placing girls in the temporary care of convents in Renaissance Florence, a practice called serbanza. During the turbulent years from 1480 to 1530, guardianship became one of the most important social services offered by female religious communities, which sheltered girls in increasing numbers. Serbanza was the major form of extrafamilial care for young girls of the middling and artisan classes, as well as for the vulnerable rich, before the advent of large‐scale custodial institutions in the later sixteenth century. Based on extensive archival records, this study documents how patterns of guardianship changed in response to political turmoil and concerns over female honour. I argue that convent guardianship formed part of the institutional and experiential foundation of female culture that cut across lines of neighbourhood and class, and introduced girls to a distinctive kind of constructed community. Boarding girls on a regular basis also raised important issues for internal monastic governance and ecclesiastical supervision. Nuns balanced the financial and social benefits of guardianship against the disruption of monastic routines and the disapproval of clerical officials. These tensions were resolved only by the reorganization of convent life and the development of new custodial institutions under Cosimo I. (pp. 177–200)
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