ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The materials and making of beauty in Early Modern Europe: texts and images

• In Event: Beauty matters. Contested arts, contested sciences in the premodern world

English Abstract

Recipes to ‘make you beautiful’ proliferated in early modern medical and scientific texts and were often accorded female expertise and connected to female production and consumption. Artworks, too, depict women engaging with the materials and making of beauty. This paper positions beautifying texts and images in conversation using two sources by women: Marie Meurdrac’s La chymie charitable et facile en faveur des dames (Paris: 1666), and a contemporaneous picture of a lady at her toilette by Louise Hollandine of the Palatinate also likely made in France. The works document materia medica, formulas, equipment, vessels and techniques, demonstrating the range of knowledge women performed. Practised on the canvases of their own bodies, women embody this knowledge and are called upon to share and teach it to other women.
Meurdrac’s work, the first chemical treatise written by a woman, is not a collection of recipes for passive reading but a textbook on active making. Meurdrac is a teacher, inviting ‘ladies’ to learn, offering to ‘show [them how] to do the operations I teach.’ Similarly, the artwork pictures a visual dialogue amongst women who perform beautifying techniques, enlisting diverse materials and equipment on display.
The paper concludes by reflecting on the sites and types of knowledge central to these works – textual, material and experiential – and argues that these are mutually interdependent and should inform scholarly approaches.

Author

• Erin Griffey, University of Auckland