Between Convent and Apothecary: Women Authors Inspired by Alessandro Piccolomini’s Natural Philosophy

In her 2016 essay ‘Alessandro Piccolomini’s Mission: Philosophy for Men and Women in Their Mother Tongue’, Letizia Panizza highlighted the attention paid by Piccolomini to women in the dedicatory letters accompanying his vernacular philosophical works. This paper aims to analyse Piccolomini’s actual female readership by focusing on the cases of two sixteenth-century Italian women who, in different contexts and with different aims, not only read Piccolomini’s natural philosophy, but also wrote about it. Sister Fiammetta Frescobaldi (1523–1586), a nun in the Florentine Dominican convent of S. Jacopo di Ripoli, wrote a compendium of Piccolomini’s Sfera del mondo; while Camilla Erculiani (1540s– post1585), apothecary in Padua, referred to Piccolomini’s Seconda parte della philosophia naturale in her Lettere di philosophia naturale (Cracow 1584). I will discuss the relationships of the two authors with Piccolomini’s works; the circumstances and the reasons for their interest in natural philosophy; and the implications of using Piccolomini as a source.