12:39 p.m., Jan. 21, 2010----Meredith K. Ray, assistant professor of Italian in the University of Delaware's Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, was recently awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship for $50,400 to complete her newest book, Prescriptions for Women: Alchemy, Medicine and the Renaissance Debate Over Women.

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The grant also will help fund Ray's archival research in Florence and Venice, Italy, and the United States, where she will visit several rare book collections to examine Renaissance handbooks and manuals devoted to alchemy, medicine and cosmetics, known as “books of secrets.”

Ray also plans to use a number of works central to her study that are among the 3,000 primary historical sources in the Unidel History of Chemistry Collection in the University of Delaware Library's Special Collections Department.

“I am thrilled and honored to receive this recognition,” Ray said. “After my National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship is concluded, I look forward to incorporating my research into the classroom with a course on scientific culture in early modern Italy, and the role of women in this arena.”

Prescriptions for Women expands upon Ray's research for her first book, Writing Gender in Women's Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance (University of Toronto Press, 2009), which focused on women's writing and gender polemics in the context of the early modern vogue for epistolary collections.

The new book investigates gender and the debate over women within the context of early modern medical and alchemical practice, placing women at the center of the emerging science, Ray said.

“Prescriptions for Women examines the role of women as writers, readers and practitioners in the arenas of early modern medicine and alchemical experimentation,” Ray said. “It broadens our existing picture of women in the Renaissance by examining their involvement in scientific culture as well as their literary presence as the subjects, audience and, in some cases, producers of medical and alchemical texts.”

Such an investigation reveals a widespread fascination during the Renaissance with works devoted to medical, alchemical and cosmetic “secrets,” intertwined with contemporary notions about sex and gender. These works must be seen against the backdrop of the “querelle des femmes,” the debate over women's nature and function that flourished throughout early modern Europe, Ray said.

“My project illuminates the crucial, yet overlooked, links between the discourses of sex and gender and those of medicine and alchemy,” Ray said. “While the primary focus of my project is early modern Italy, my investigation has broad implications for the study of women and scientific culture throughout early modern Europe.”

Ray's research interests include early modern literature and culture, women's writing, early modern science and medicine and epistolary writing.

A member of the UD faculty since 2003, Ray received her doctorate in Italian language and literature from the University of Chicago in 2002.

Awards and fellowships include a Renaissance Society of America Research Grant (2009), a Penn Humanities Forum/Mellon Regional Faculty Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania (2008-09), and a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Fellowship (1999-2000).

In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, Ray co-edited the Lettere familiari e di complimento of Arcangela Tarabotti, an Italian Renaissance nun, with Lynn Westwater, (Turin: Rosenberg and Sellier, 2005), and a forthcoming translation of this work.

Article by Jerry Rhodes