Isabelle Clairhout is working as a PhD student at the Department of Literary Studies. She studied Latin and English linguistics and literature at Ghent University. Currently she is preparing her dissertation on early modern female authors of medical and scientific works in England. She investigates to what extent the authorial self-representation of these women contributed to, and was a product of, developments in scientific authorship and medical thinking, and the booming medical and literary marketplaces. Analyses are based on the works of Margaret Cavendish, Jane Sharp (The Midwives Book), Mary Trye (Medicatrix, or the Woman-Physician), as well as a corpus of medicinal recipe books, and are put in the context of the precarious position of the female author as empirical witness, both real and textual.