Strocchia’s Forgotten Healers is elegantly conceived and written, thoroughly researched, deeply grounded in a variety of archival and secondary sources, nicely documented with ten images, and, all things considered, one of the best books on the Italian Renaissance in years—at once insightful, illuminating, wide-ranging, and comprehensive. Focused primarily on Florence and its environs, Forgotten Healers casts its net widely to include such cities as Bologna and Rome and cuts across different scholarly concerns: histories of (bodily) senses and sensibilities, medical history, material history, the history of food and dietetics, women’s and gender history, urban history, garden history, patronage history, institutional history, religious history, social history, political history, economic history, the history of communication, and cultural history.
A bold and generous work of recuperative history, Strocchia has brought these “forgotten healers” vividly back to life in a sophisticated, integrated narrative and, as a result, has made much of what was previously...