The co-ordinator and chair, Sabrina Minuzzi, introduced Tessa Storey, whose paper bore the fascinating title of ‘The Lament of the Melons’: Extracting the rules of healthy living from cheap print in sixteenth and seventeenth century Italy-with a glance at England and France”.  Apparently, early modern medical cheap print was full of self help books which recommended living healthily, as this would reduce the need to call on the services of expensive doctors.  These texts represent a filtering down of more expensive regimen, which were out of reach of the ordinary person.  She reported that she has not found an equivalent amount of material in French or English to that in Italian, although she did note that this might be because she was less sure of where to look.  This, of course, is one of the limitations of this comparative approach, as it either relies on getting large numbers of scholars to collaborate fully on a single paper (especially as things change over time as well as location), or having someone present on an area which is not their direct specialism (which is necessarily somewhat speculative), or taking a directly comparative approach which only looks at a small number of cases – as Massimo Rospocher and I did by comparing 16th century England and Italy – but is therefore not really a broad brush picture.  Nevertheless, it was refreshing to hear someone acknowledge the limitations of their approach, and it didn’t make Tessa’s comments on the Lament of the Melons any less interesting or amusing.   The Lament is an Italian barzelletta, which might either be intended to make fun of melon-sellers or it might be by them, in an attempt to persuade people to buy their produce.  Either way, it suggests that the vendors were aware of the medical properties which were ascribed to melons and other fruit in treatises and regimen.

Sandra Cavallo then talked about ‘Genres of medical didactic literature and medical culture in early modern Italy’.  She pointed out that although utilitarian texts and self help books had been widely used in research, it might be worth looking at how they talk about medicine as well as what they actually recommend as medical practises.  The final paper of the day was given by Hana Jadrná Matějková on ‘Early Modern midwifery books from German speaking regions and the Czech Lands between Scholarship and practice’.  She argued that print allowed men to penetrate women’s field of midwifery and obstetrics, first in print and then in practice.  She challenged the view that these books were owned by midwives, pointing out that there is no evidence of their annotation by midwives in England. Whereas women learned their craft from other women, men’s practical experience was limited to Caesarian sections on dead mothers and the removal of dead babies from the womb.

After a short presentation by Julia Martins and Andrea van Leerdam, it was time for the