Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Keywords: early modern England, family, domestic life, gender, health, illness, medicine, care-giving, recipe books, letters, correspondence, seventeenth century, eighteenth century, social history, the gentry

About Me: I recently completed my PhD at the University of York, with a thesis entitled ‘Sick Bodies, Social Bonds: Health, Care, and Gentry Family Dynamics, c.1630-1750’. It explored how sickness and healthcare intersected with emotion, identity and power dynamics within early modern elite households. It was primarily based on personal letters, sourced through extensive archival research. I argued that experiences of illness and care did not just reflect existing family dynamics, but were productive building blocks in their formation and maintenance.

Prior to this, I completed my BA at Durham University in 2016, and my dissertation on seventeenth-century women’s medical recipes received the ‘Undergraduate Dissertation of the Year’ award from the Royal Historical Society and History Today magazine. An article based on this dissertation was published in History Today in April 2018. I received an MA in Early Modern History from York in 2017; my thesis examined seventeenth-century marital ‘cruelty’ in the city’s church courts.

Recent Publications: “Recipes for Success: how women shared medical knowledge in the seventeenth century”, History Today magazine, Vol. 68, 4 (April 2018)