Webinar: Women’s Reproductive Lives in Renaissance Italian Lyric Poetry – Shannon McHugh
Women’s Ideas in the History of Medicine
Fertility, Maternity, and Reproduction – 2025 Webinars Series
Organised by Jil Muller & Fabrizio Bigotti. Organised in collaboration with the Centre for the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists – University of Paderborn, this series seeks to understand the role of women in the history of medicine by exploring their contributions in fields such as natural philosophy, household remedies, plant manipulation and selection, as well as midwifery.
Women’s Reproductive Lives in Renaissance Italian Lyric Poetry
What can a sonnet teach us about the history of women’s reproductive bodies? For the early modern world, notions about pregnancy and childbirth have been well documented by historians, who have combed through archival and print materials composed by the period’s medical, religious, and humanist authorities. Literary texts, however, have been consulted less, including lyric poetry; short, emotional poems are not normally among the historian’s go-to objects. Yet lyric is rife with representations of motherhood. Examples appear in verse written in vernacular and in Latin, in poems of Marian worship and of autobiographic account, such as the prolific poet Francesca Turina (1553–1641), who composed numerous poems on miscarriage, childbirth, and early motherhood.
The details captured in her descriptions both complicate standard historical narratives and flesh out our understanding of family practices in this period, shading in scholarly models with affective dimensions. This paper expands our understanding of the history of women’s reproductive autonomy by tracing depictions of pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, birth, and nursing in Renaissance Italian lyric poetry. Unlike texts by medical and theological authorities, lyric provides access to personal experience and can do so on a wider scale: it was the most democratic of literary genres, practiced by men of various social stripes, and, in early modern Italy, by numerous women.
About the Speaker…
Shannon McHugh is Assistant Director of Research at The Huntington Library. Her research focuses on early modern Italian and French lyric poetry and gender. Publications include Petrarch and the Making of Gender in Renaissance Italy (Amsterdam UP, 2023) and the co-edited volume Vittoria Colonna: Poetry, Religion, Art, Impact (Amsterdam UP, 2021). She was the 2023–24 Molina Fellow in the History of Medicine at The Huntington, where she researched her current book project, “Women’s Reproductive Lives in Renaissance Lyric Poetry.”
16 April 2025 – 4.00 PM (CEST)
Read more about the entire webinar series and find details on how to register on this website.
