Cheese-making and Knowledge-making: Women’s Expertise and Men’s Explanation

Early modern cheesemaking is accompanied by a rather constant scientific interest to understand such a peculiar natural process of transformation of natural matter by collecting information from those who mastered it in their everyday life. It turns out that in early modern Europe the art of transforming milk into cheese and butter was almost exclusively the domain of women makers. By showing connections between ideas about transformation of natural matter, gender, and techniques of manipulation of nature, I argue that these observations and artisanal practices contributed to changing the way knowledge was made and nature was known by physicians, natural philosophers, and natural historians around the time of the “scientific revolution.” This contribution was a process of transformation of expertise into explanation.