Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History)

Daughters of Alchemy is the history of scientific women in Renaissance Italy. This book’s premise leads one to believe Italian women were the uncredited founders of alchemy, the unsung heroines who had an enormous impact on the sciences as we know it. Most people are not aware there were influential women in science at that time, much less in Italy. This is because there weren’t. This book is only one hundred fifty pages long (the rest is notes), and yet to fill space the author seems to discuss every single snippet of information we have about these women. Why do we need to read a letter asking for more ingredients? Because there is so little material. The lack of material is an indicator that the women weren’t really all that important to the development of alchemy. It seems they did write some “Books of Secrets”, volumes of iffy recipes for cosmetic, household, and medicinal use. Besides that, they didn’t do much. The writing style was wordy and unnecessarily sesquipedalian. This book is certainly overstating its case; I would not recommend.