The Women's Baths: Female Agency, Medical Knowledge, and The Healing Body in Late Renaissance Italy

Abstract This article examines the overlooked role of women in shaping medical and cultural practices at Renaissance spas, with a focus on Bagni di Lucca in Tuscany. Drawing on a heterogeneous body of sources, including letters, medical treatises, architectural evidence, and material culture, it reconstructs women's experiences as patients, patrons, and participants in balneological culture. While early modern physicians prescribed thermal baths for a wide range of ailments, particularly female infertility, women's correspondence reveals more situated and active engagements with hydrotherapy. Letters by noblewomen such as Isabella di Capua illustrate observation and familiarity with humoral theory, while those by Ginevra Gozzadini show how therapeutic routines could intersect with spiritual reflection. Attending closely to the material settings of the baths and to the bodily routines they imposed, the article explores the sensory, affective, and mnemonic dimensions of bathing. It highlights how taste, heat, touch, temporality, and ritualized practice shaped perceptions of illness and cure within broader structures of medical authority and social hierarchy. By foregrounding women's voices and embodied experience, the article complicates physician‑centred accounts of early modern hydrotherapy and reappraises the spa as a site of negotiation between medical prescription and lived practice, elite and vernacular knowledge, and body and belief.