A Mother’s Manual for the Women of Ferrara: A Fifteenth-Century Guide to Pregnancy and Pediatrics, ed. Gabriella Zuccolin and trans. Martin Marafioti. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, 89. New York and Toronto: Iter Press, 2022, pp. 254.

Abstract

Abstract: Gabriella Zuccolin (Ph.D., Salerno), Andrew W. Mellow Fellow at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, and Martin Marafioti (Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University), Professor at Pace University in the Dyson College of Arts and Sciences, have collaborated to bring readers a translation of Michele Savonarola’s vernacular Italian manual bearing the Latin title, De regimine praegnantium et noviter natorum usque ad septennium, or Regimen for Pregnant Women and Newborns up to the Seventh Year, which they have introduced, translated, and annotated. For the new book publication, they have given Savonarola’s work an accurately descriptive title in English: A Mother’s Manual for the Women of Ferrara: A Fifteenth-Century Guide to Pregnancy and Pediatrics. Their work contributes to the increasingly rich academic literature on medieval and early modern medicine, midwifery, maternity, and the realities of the childbearing year, including the care of the newborn. Their work can be greatly appreciated in relation to work of cultural and medical historian Monica Green on the medieval midwife-physician Trotula of Salerno and her treatise, called The Trotula, as well the work of other scholars of medieval and early modern medicine.