Professor Sandra Cavallo - Professor of Early Modern History

I specialise in the social and cultural history of the 16th and 17th centuries, focusing in particular on Italy. I have worked on health-care and medicine, gender and family relationships and on the home and its material culture. These themes are prominent in my contribution to the first year module HS1108 From Renaissance to Revolution and in my Survey course Everyday Life in the Italian Renaissance. In both my teaching and research I am concerned with ordinary citizens and how the religious and political upheavals of the period and its commercial, printing and scientific revolutions affected their life experience and mindset.

One strand of my research has been concerned with the complex range of health-care provisions that were available to early modern people. Along those supplied by medical and poor-relief institutions (discussed in my 1995 CUP book Charity and Power in Early modern Italy) I have considered in a number of articles the often neglected caring arrangements offered by families, neighbours, and other members of the community. The early modern home emerges from these studies as a key locus of care. My more recent work has highlighted the role that households performed not just in curing but in preventing illness. A range of routine domestic tasks were indeed given health significance by a medical philosophy which understood diet, exercise, sleep, hygiene, a balanced emotional life and the quality of the air in the home as key to a healthy life.   The study of these everyday practices and of the spaces and objects employed to support them has resulted in the award-winning book I co-authored with Tessa Storey (Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy, OUP 2013), in the co-edited volume Conserving Health in Early Modern Culture (MUP 2017) and in the chapter ‘Objects’ in the forthcoming Bloomsbury Cultural History of Medicine.  I am currently working at a synthesis that considers household medical practices in a comparative and global perspective, and aims to understand in particular why was domestic medicine so widespread in the early modern period, whether the printing revolution determined an increase in lay medical knowledge and initiative, and how did these practices affect gender relationships.

My interest in gender and home life has also led me to challenge the divide often established between the domestic/female and the public/male  spaces. I have addressed these issues in a study of the Italian baroque palace, and its internal lived space, published in Historische Anthropologie, and I am writing a chapter that explores how noblewomen obtained influence and authority from their control of channels of communication that connected the palace to ‘feminine’ urban spaces such as the church and the convent.  

Another strand of my research has explored various aspects of the experience of early modern artisans. A path-breaking article published in At Home in Renaissance Italy (2006) focuses on the living arrangements and work spaces of Renaissance artisans, while I have devoted a full monograph to the career patterns, networks and masculine ideals of Artisans of the Body (MUP 2008), i.e. those occupied in various aspects of body and beauty-care  (barber-surgeons, wigmakers, perfumers, bath-keepers, etc.). Further articles, appeared in European History Quarterly and Journal of Family History, have looked at the distinctive traits of the father-son relationship among these social groups and at attitudes to unmarried artisans in Catholic and Protestant countries. I am now returning to the theme of beauty and body-care in a new project on European perceptions of the female Ottoman body.

More information about my research is available via PURE.

Email - s.cavallo@rhul.ac.uk