Jewish women in pre-modern Italy: Magic, medicine and the inquisition

The comprehensive objective of JeWit is to provide the first historical reconstruction of Jewish women’s everyday life and material culture in medieval and early modern Italy based on medico-magical traditions related to procreation, childbirth and other matters associated with the female body.

Despite recent advances in the study of Jewish magic, gender, and Jewish-Christian relations, integrated in-depth research on Jewish women through the lens of medico-magical texts and from a perspective which considers local, oral-aural, and cross-cultural dynamics of knowledge transmission has been mostly neglected.

Using a sophisticated methodology which integrates for the first time in-depth analysis of different types of sources (i.e.

Jewish and non-Jewish manuscripts, archival documents, material and artistic evidence), JeWit seeks to: a) make accessible for the first time in a commented edition a selection of the most relevant manuscript excerpts on Jewish childbirth techniques circulated in pre-modern Italy; b) detect patterns of continuity, rupture and change in the dissemination of Jewish medico-magical lore related to childbirth during the shift from late antiquity to the medieval era and in the transfer from the East to the West; c) assess the boundaries between Jewish magic and science in medieval and early modern Italy; d) unravel traces of the sense of childbirth as experienced by pre-modern Italian Jewish woman that occasionally survive encapsulated in the texts, thus contributing to a more inclusive intellectual and cultural history of Italian Jewry and fostering large-scale debates on women’s well-being, diversity and inclusion, religious and cultural identity.

After prestigious postdoctoral positions in Israel, the U.S., and Europe, a MSCA-PF at EPHE in Paris under the guide of Nicolas Weill-Parot will allow me to establish my scholarly independence, remarkably expanding my career prospects toward a consolidated academic position.