In Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy women were, perhaps for the first time, widely engaged in literary activities. This was by no means due to a gentlemanly concession. Male and female scholars debated whether women had the intellectual qualities to read, write and think as much as men. Focusing on Renaissance books of secrets, Meredith Ray suggests that in the querelle des femmes, natural philosophy and medicine played a relevant role, which, however, continues to be overlooked. In Il merito delle donne (1600), for instance, Moderata Fonte employed scientific discourse to enhance her ‘protofeminist agenda’ (p. 83). In order to reassess women's position in the world of learning, the writer Lucrezia Marinella often used the language of natural philosophy in her literary works. Even male scholars such as Alessandro Piccolomini emphasized the importance of women's scientific education. As I secreti di Isabella Cortese (1561) shows, women played a decisive role in the diffusion and consumption of the so-called books of secrets. Published in 1569, the book went through nineteen editions in the sixteenth century. Even though it was probably written by Girolamo Ruscellai, as Ray suggests, the recourse to a fictitious female authorship is indicative of women's prominent role in that literary genre.

Once the study of Nature began to be mainly practised outside places traditionally restricted to men, such as universities and male convents, women could take part in the emergence of a still manifold new learning. In early modern Italy, an increasing number of women from different social and cultural backgrounds pursued their scientific interests in the laboratories of alchemists and in the workshops of apothecaries, in the academies, the salons and the courts. Their presence has not been noticed in the traditional accounts of the Scientific Revolution. As Ray notes, ‘it is not women who are missing from the picture: it is our lens that must be adjusted to perceive them’ (p. 4). The re-evaluation of practical learning by historians of alchemy and technology offered to Ray a widening lens to appreciate the presence and role of women. Thus Ray sheds light on those who were at the margins of the great male figures, like Caterina Sforza, progenitrix of the Medici's grand-ducal dynasty and their alchemical interests. Through her son, Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, Sforza's manuscript Esperimenti probably passed to Francesco I, Giovanni's son and first Grand Duke of Florence. The Medicis' alchemical involvement, such as Cosimo's foundry in Palazzo Vecchio and Francesco's casino in San Marco, confirms the link between alchemy and power in Italian Renaissance courts. Interest in the transmutation of metals and poisons, but also beauty treatments and cosmetics, is typical of this ‘court experimentalism’ (p. 17). According to Ray, both I secreti of the pseudo-Isabella Cortese and Caterina's Esperimenti provide a ‘gendered form of knowledge’ drawn from women's direct experience of their bodies (p. 52). Rooting the work of these scholars within the scientific field, however, Ray's narrative presents hermeticism, natural magic, alchemy and early experimental philosophy not as different, albeit linked, elements of a complex cultural process, but rather just as modern science. Ray ‘virtually’ identifies secrets and experiments (p. 46), natural magic and natural philosophy (p. 47). The reader has the impression that ‘experimental methodology’ (p. 23), ‘empirical culture’ (p. 52), ‘new empiricism’ (p. 94) and ‘early empiricism’ (p. 194) are nothing less than synonyms for the new science (p. 157).

Along with the hitherto marginal female figures, the book highlights the role of apothecaries and other practitioners. Sforza had an intense exchange of materials and recipes with her apothecary in Forlì, Ludovico Albertini, and with the apothecary nuns in the convent of Le Murate in Florence. The marginality originating from gender and from social class combined in the singular figure of the Paduan apothecary Camilla Erculiani. Published in Cracow in 1584, Erculiani's Lettere di philosophia naturale display a probably imaginary exchange of letters between the author and some male characters, whose main role consists in legitimizing the author's position as a natural philosopher. In this capacity, Erculiani discusses many topics within the traditional field of Aristotelian meteorology. Looking for the natural causes of the universal Deluge, the Paduan apothecary even ventures in the mined field of theology. Her naturalistic approach, influenced by Paracelsian ideas such as the correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm or the necessary balance between man and nature, caught the attention of the Catholic Inquisition. It sounds paradoxical, therefore, that in her defence the jurist Giacomo Menochio maintained that, coming from a woman, Erculiani's ideas were negligible and not at all dangerous. Despite the persistence of such views, women's quest for an unbiased consideration in the Republic of Letters was not ignored in Counter-Reformation Italy. The case of Margherita Sarrocchi is, in this respect, significant. This former pupil of the mathematician Luca Valerio was part of the wide web of connections built by Galileo and intended as the bridgehead for his planned Copernican conquest of Rome after the Nuncius (1610). The failure of Galileo's strategy evidently appeared in the alteration of the relationship with Sarrocchi long before Il Saggiatore (1623) and the dispute between the Tuscan philosopher and the Jesuits. To the orthodox Sarrocchi, Galileo's overt Copernicanism was unacceptable.

As the late Stephen Jay Gould once noted, because of a general prejudice women have for long time suffered an exclusion both from the practice of science and from its history. Unlike some modern feminist readings only focusing on the epistemic bias operating in Western science, Daughters of Alchemy shows that, in spite of that long-standing bias, women participated in the Scientific Revolution and contributed to the affirmation of a new approach to nature based on active human intervention.