Female Anatomists: Gendered Perspective of Sensory Expertise in Early Modern Europe

International conference “Female Anatomists: A Gendered Perspective of Sensory Expertise in Early Modern Europe”, will take place at the University of Liège and online, on the 11th and 12th of December 2025.

This is the conclusive event of the « Female Anatomists » Incentive Grant for Scientific Research (MIS Mandat d’Impulsion Scientifique) n° F.4544.23 (2023-2025), awarded by the Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.-FNRS).

The conference aims to explore the sensory experiences of women involved in practices of anatomy during the early modern period, thereby shedding light on female surgical skills and women’s sensory encounters with dissected bodies.

In the program
Sharon Strocchia (Professor, Emory University), Domesticating Anatomy: Women and the Art of Leeching in Late Renaissance Italy.
Alessandra Quaranta (Researcher, Italian-German Historical Institute of Trento), Observing Symptoms, Overturning Corpses: Women’s Sensory Experiences of the Ill and Dead Bodies in the Republic of Venice (Sixteenth–Seventeenth Centuries).
Cynthia Klestinec (Professor, Miami University), Women and the Popular Errors Tradition.
Alessandra Foscati (Associate Professor, UniCamillus – International University of Health and Medical Sciences, Rome), Bloody Practices. The work of Midwives Between the Fourteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Italian Peninsula and France).
Alessandro Laverda (Postdoctoral Scholar, University of Liège), Modesty, Noblewomen, and the Inquiry on Incorrupt Female Corpses in Early Modern Italy and Spain.
Michael Stolberg (Senior Professor, University of Würzburg), Female Surgeons in Early Modern Germany (1550-1750).
Catherine Baudouin (PhD Candidate, EHESS/Centre Alexandre Koyré, Paris), The Surgical Skills of Midwives in Spain and the Spanish Atlantic World in the Sixteenth Century.
Julia Martins (Public Historian), A Charitable Female Healer: Madame Fouquet’s Remedies and Seventeenth-Century Medicine.
Lucia Dacome (Associate Professor and Pauline M.H. Mazumdar Chair in the History of Medicine, University of Toronto), Surgical Families: Women, Skill, and Mobility in Italy’s Long Eighteenth Century.
Introduction by Viktoria von Hoffmann (Senior Research Associate, Fund for Scientific Research/University of Liège).

Discussants
Sandra Cavallo (Professor, Royal Holloway University of London); Francesco Paolo de Ceglia (Full professor, Università di Bari Aldo Moro); Rafael Mandressi (Research Director CNRS, EHESS/Centre Koyré, Paris); and Gideon Manning (Visiting Associate Professor, UCLA).

Participation is free and open to everyone. Please make sure to register for the event no later than 7th of December. Click here to register.