How did medieval recommendations for women's diets fare in the Early Modern period and beyond? Since specific dietary advice for women, at least in gynaecological manuals, is often for the same kinds of food recommended for the ill or convalescing, there is some parallel to be found in later time periods. Dietary recommendations remained fairly stable, even though by 1650 the understanding of how the body processed food was changing. Sources written specifically for women as housewives and household managers began to appear more frequently in the latter half of the Early Modern era. We will see that, at least in those books, the association of women with care, nourishment, and healing is more explicit.

The waning of the longstanding humoral theory is explored in so far as it may have led to a different understanding of how women should eat. Mechanical theories of digestion, which posited that the stomach grinds up food rather than concocting it, applied to both men and women. Later theories, such as chemical and digestive (rather than concoction of food), would have likewise made little distinction between the digestive process of men and women, though of course there was some advice on what was good for women to eat. There was a longstanding belief that the digestion of aristocratic men and women was somehow more delicate and their palate more refined than those of the lower classes.