Blogposts 2024-25
Lectures
Convenors for 2024-25
Ewa Zakrzewska
Jakub Ochocinski
24.10.2024
Bogdan Iacob — Socialist Tropical Medicine
A lecture by Bogdan Iacob
October 24, Sala dei Cuoi and online, Villa Salviati
Abstract: The presentation explored narratives about the tropics formulated by state socialist physicians in the context of communist aid to newly decolonized peoples. There was a transition from anticolonial critiques of medical essentializations to a full embrace of tropical medicine as a field showcasing socialist modernity. On the one hand, Eastern Europeans highlighted the colonial origins of tropical medicine. Assistance (either bilateral or via the World Health Organization) to post-colonial governments focused on the social-economic determinants of infectious diseases. Medicine was a conduit for tackling the structural causes of ill-health, a factor in the non-capitalist transformation the Global South. Last but not least, learning about maladies at the tropics was a vehicle for East-South scientific cooperation, as socialist experts brought home knowledge developed by their post-colonial peers.
On the other hand, greater East-West cooperation catalysed by détente and the WHO’s Special Programme for research and training in tropical diseases (since 1976) facilitated the convergence between state socialist and liberal tropical medicine. Tropical distinctiveness, a lingering yet muted motif of socialist medical narratives during the late 1950s and the 1960s, held centre stage in the last two decades of the Cold War. Narratives about non-European, exotic diseases hardened civilizational differences and facilitated racialisations about developing countries and their peoples. Tropical medicine in Eastern Europe, just like in the West, was integral to the securitization of relations with the Global South: brown and black persons turned into meretriciously healthy carriers of non-endemic diseases threatening civilized socialist states. The interplay between anti-colonialism and securitization fuelled socialist tropical medicine as epistemic background for Second World whiteness. This knowledge and the social-political imaginary that accompanied it was rooted in interwar colonial fantasies and carried into post-socialist Europeanization.
About the speaker: Bogdan C. Iacob is a researcher at the "Nicolae Iorga" Institute of History (Romanian Academy) and at the Institute for Habsburg and Balkan Studies (Austrian Academy of Sciences). His work centers on the role of Eastern European experts (e.g., historians and physicians) at international organizations and in post-colonial spaces. Among his publications: Health in Socialism Goes Global. The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonisation (Cambridge UP, 2022) and “Malariology and decolonization: Eastern European experts from the League of Nations to the World Health Organization”, Journal of Global History (2022). Most recently he published Health as a Human Right and Eastern European Anti-Colonialism in Socialism and International Law (Oxford University Press, 2024).
19.02.2025
Rob Boddice— Ritual Efficacy and the Power of Belief: Re-appraising placebo and nocebo in the history of medicine
February 26, Sala del Consiglio, Villa Salviati
Abstract: In the framework of EUI’s Department of History’s Monthly Research Meetings, this event, co-organised by the History of Science and Medicine working group, featured a talk by Prof. Rob Boddice (Tampere University, Finland).
In the 2010 book, The Problem of Ritual Efficacy, William Sax pointed out that what scholars tend to identify as ‘ritual’, those actually involved in them tend to see as a form of work, or technique, or practice, with a particular end in mind. The analytic distance of the scholar assumes, on the basis of the nonrationality of rituals, that they are intrinsically ineffective, save for being vehicles for expressing ‘inner states of feeling and emotion’. Sax asked a provocative question: how might they actually be ‘instrumental’; how might they ‘actually do things’? In this paper Rob Boddice asked the same question of ritual medical encounters. In his ambitious talk, he demonstrated interest not only in the ‘pre-scientific’ procedures of folk medicinal cures, magic and quackery, but in the ritualized encounters of modern medicine. He took his cue from an overlooked observation of Charles Rosenberg that the placebo effect has to do with the ‘patterned interaction between doctor and patient, one which evolved over centuries into a conventionalized social ritual’, in order to disrupt an abiding ethical distaste for placebo and to ask: what happens to our understanding of the history of medicine and contemporary medical practice when we begin with the assumption that placebo effects (and their opposite, nocebo effects) are real?
About the speaker: Prof. Rob Boddice is a senior researcher at the Centre for the History of Experience (HEX) in Finland. His work focuses on the history of experience and of medicine, and specifically on the history of pain and medical experimentation. He has previously held positions at Harvard University, McGill University, the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, and Freie Universität Berlin. His recent books include Humane Professions: The Defence of Experimental Medicine, 1876-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Feeling Dis-Ease in Modern History: Experiencing Medicine and Illness (Bloomsbury, 2022), edited with Bettina Hitzer, Knowing Pain: A History of Sensation, Emotion and Experience (Polity, 2023), and The History of Emotions (Manchester University Press, 2024).
09.04.2025
Paola Bertucci — Science and the Invention of European Modernity
April 9, Refectory, Badia Fiesolana
Abstract: In her invited lecture, Prof. Paola Bertucci (Yale University) brought to the fore the notion of modernity, as conceptualized by European scholars in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, through the lens of material and visual culture present in everyday life. Prof. Bertucci’s argument emphasized that the rhetoric of modernity relied on science and technology, in particular on the role they played in making European colonial projects possible. She proceed to examine how such rhetoric spread across the European elites through scientific texts, toys, and educational pastimes that normalised notions of European dominance over the world. Furthermore, the lecture reflected on imagining knowledge as a cumulative pursuit, uncannily similar to the concurrent colonial expansion of European states; on imaginaries of progress as both fueled by discovering lost inventions and sketching the horizons for future discoveries; and the role of mechanical inventions in the arguments on the superiority of modernity over the ancient age.
About the speaker: Paola Bertucci is a professor in the Department of History and in the History of Science and Medicine Program at Yale University. Her research focuses on science, technology, and medicine in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, mostly in Europe. She is the author of Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (Yale University Press, 2017), which looks at the Enlightenment from the perspective of learned artisans and argues for the centrality of the mechanical arts in French colonial and commercial projects. Artisanal Enlightenment was awarded the 2019 Louis Gottschalk prize from ASECS. Her most recent book, In the Land of Marvels. Science, Fabricated Realities, and Industrial Espionage in the Age of the Grand Tour (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023) examines the relationship between eighteenth-century science and information cultures through the lens a medical controversy and its life on the printed page. In the Land of Marvels received the 2025 Paul Bunge prize for the best book on the history of scientific instruments. She is the president of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
20.11.2024
Lorraine Daston — Masterclass in the History of Knowledge
As an emerging field, the history of knowledge combines a multitude of topics, approaches, and methodologies. How do we navigate the difference between ‘science’ and ‘knowledge’ as historians? The history of science became a distinct academic discipline in the mid-20th century, emphasizing the narrative that science propelled modernity and geopolitical dominance, especially in the ‘West’. This perspective, tied to events like the Scientific Revolution, has been critiqued for its Eurocentrism and linear progression model. The emerging field of the history of knowledge challenges these views by broadening its scope to include diverse, non-Western, and non-scientific knowledge systems and practices. This shift dissolves rigid boundaries, allowing exploration of various knowledge forms across cultures and epochs, prompting historians to reassess the criteria and hierarchies that define knowledge.
In exploring this question, seven researchers from the history department at varied stages of their early careers presented a primary source of their choice. This opened discussions around the challenges and questions behind their topics of research. All presentations were commented on by Prof. Lorraine Daston, Director emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. The event concluded with Prof. Daston summarising and giving directions for the development for the history of knowledge.
In this exploration of knowledge production in historical contexts, we delved into the intersections of science, medicine, and information gathering across different periods and regions. In the first part of the workshop, Adam Mezes (Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow) presented on Habsburg quarantine stations revealing how these border installations in the 18th century were not merely medical checkpoints but complex information networks that collected data on epidemics, commerce, and even folkloric phenomena like vampires. Marek Maj’s (2nd year History researcher) presentation examined the curious case of "kołtun" (matted hair) in 19th-century Kraków, where physicians debated the existence of a supposed disease that was ultimately dismissed as a marker of peasant superstition. Maxime Guttin (4th year History researcher) showed us how a physician's 1837 work on civilization's impact on the nervous system demonstrates early attempts to link brain physiology with social progress, and Timo Houtekamer (4th year History researcher) presented a case study from a Zurich psychiatric clinic in 1906 that explores the complex dynamics between psychiatrists and patients in diagnostic processes. In the second part of the workshop, Alexandre Claude (2nd year History researcher) presented Michele Mercati's 16th-century stone collection and its representation as not merely aesthetic but programmatic, Ewa Zakrzewska (2nd year History researcher) showed the information architecture behind Royal Society's experimental wish lists, and Jakub Ochociński (2nd year History researcher) presented the case of annotations in early modern Polish-Lithuanian calendars by focusing on Lwów-based Armenian lawyer's notes testing the weather.
Diverse questions drove these investigations. To what extent did quarantine stations go beyond enforcing policies, and what knowledge did they produce? How did matted hair become a marker of class difference, and how should historians interpret the symptoms of this 'non-existent' disease? How was the brain mobilized to shape understanding of degeneration and human perfectibility? How can patients be understood as active participants in diagnostic processes? What can an ideal cabinet representation reveal about physical collections and knowledge practices? How did early scientific societies shape the category of "experiment," and who would be responsible for explaining phenomena? What did it mean to "note various happenings" in early modern calendars, what was worth noting, and why?
Furthermore, we may establish common threads of interest among all participating presentations. The first part of the workshop showcased sources revolting around the themes of medicine, authority and control. They are a case in point for questioning the category of “modern” scientific and medical knowledge as divorced from “superstition”, “folk beliefs” and being formed in a top-to-bottom transmission instead of negotiated between the scientific author and their subjects. Furthermore, all presentations invite us to reconsider different dimensions of observation and knowledge-making: How is a persona of a scientist/observer shaped and trained? How can we learn about the perspectives of human subjects of scientific or medical investigations, and how do we find their voices in the archives? How are the standards of what comes to be the subject of knowledge – be it a disease, the ebb and flow of the weather, experimental procedures etc. – made and implemented?
In the summary, Prof. Daston highlighted that all these presentations were in the twilight zone between science and knowledge. Many of the people, objects, and sources discussed could be situated in areas between formulaic knowledge and something less institutionalised. These could be incredibly fruitful cases in thinking about what are the goals of knowledge as opposed to the goals of science, and how do historians place themselves on the spectrum between those concepts. While science is understood to concern systematic explanation, norms, and methods, numerous histories of knowledge discussed here are about prediction and efficacy in the vernacular world and about shifting standards and criteria of scientific explanation – thus taking a meta-approach to “science” as a label.
Science is a systematic enterprise focused on acquiring and testing knowledge through empirical methods, experimentation, and logical reasoning, typically aiming to produce predictive and replicable results. The goal of science is explanation and prediction. Knowledge, however, encompasses a broader spectrum that includes practical skills, cultural traditions, philosophical insights, and artistic expressions. Science, it can be argued, is thus a subset of knowledge, distinguished by its methodologies and specific goals, while knowledge as a whole is more inclusive, encompassing diverse ways of understanding and interacting with the world.
About the speaker: Professor Lorraine Daston is director emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Her work focuses on the history of rationality, especially, but not exclusively, scientific rationality. She has published widely on the history of wonder, objectivity, observation, the moral authority of nature, probability theory, Cold War rationality, and scientific modernity. Her most recent books are Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (Princeton University Press, 2022) and Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate (Columbia Global Reports, 2023).
06.12.2024
La Specola Natural History Museum Roundtable: “Curating and researching science”
December 6, Sala del Capitolo, Badia Fiesolana
Joint event with the Material and Visual History Working Group
Abstract: In cooperation with the Material and Visual History Working Group, we hosted a roundtable session with the Florence Museum of Natural History, La Specola, to celebrate its reopening in February 2024 after four years of refurbishment. Following our guided visit to La Specola in May 2024, we had a unique opportunity at the EUI to host the team that manages the museum and carried out its great renovation. La Specola’s directors, Lucilla Conigliello and Annamaria Nistri, and three curators, Gianna Innocenti, Marta Biaggini, and Fausto Barbagli, discussed the challenges of displaying scientific objects, instruments and natural items (animals, plants, minerals, anatomical waxes, etc.) in the 21st century, and in a building with a remarkable history going back three centuries, as La Specola had been the first scientific museum opened to the public in European history. They also gave us precious insights into the nature of different collections and into their daily tasks (displaying, curating and researching) to help us understand how can we rely on such museums, materials deposited in them, and curators’ knowledge to support our own research inquiries.
26.02.2025
Rob Boddice — Masterclass in the History of Emotions and Senses
The first session brought into focus senses and emotions in early modern cultural history, and their manifestation in artefacts and social exchanges. Rose Byfleet (visiting PhD researcher) presented on the maternal affect and female fertility in the inheritance of scented girdles. Through her analysis of inventories of jewelry belonging to female members of the Medici family, she has identified a connection between the use of scented girdles and marital status, and therefore a further connection to the treatments of female fertility and talismanic and apotropaic properties associated with the perfumed girdles. Josephine Koopman (1st year History researcher) gave a paper on recovering sensory experiences of snuff-taking among early modern Dutch users. By this, she allowed us a fascinating insight into extracting both sensual and affective reactions to the new fashions propelled by the Dutch colonial expansion, and into the disproportionate representation of hostile responses to snuff-taking by the habit’s critics. Gabriel Farrugia (3rd year History researcher) introduced the audience to the phenomenon of mutiny on Malta's Corsair vessels in the early 17th century. He highlighted the notion of “emotional justice” as experienced by the rebel sailors, and drew attention to the role of remembering past emotions as evidence in related Inquisitorial trials. Natalia Woszczyk (4th year History researcher) spoke on compassion and the Bohemian refugees' admission to the Duchy of Prussia in 1548. In a presentation highly sensitive to contemporary phenomena of migration and displacement, she commented on the paradoxes of the relational nature of compassion between asylum seekers (religious refugees) and those granting refuge (religious and secular authorities), and emphasized compassion’s dual nature as an internal feeling and external act.
The second session showcased sources related to senses and emotions present in the arts, and offered insights into representations of feminity, mental and affective disturbances, and political agency. Daniele Cal (2nd year History researcher) presented on sounds, affects and emotional experiences in Revolutionary Italy. Introducing the notion of a “sonic affective regime”, he examined the role played by songs, chants, and public speeches in mobilizing Italian society during the period of the French revolution. Chiara Lacroix (3rd year History researcher) gave a presentation on the fin-de-siecle Japanese actress Sada Yacco and emotional authenticity. She encouraged us to reconsider Orientalist fantasies of passionate feminity mediated to the Western audiences by the actress Sada Yacco, and to ponder how an “authentic”, emotional female self was constructed by her stage persona. Timo Houtekamer (4th year History researcher) gave a presentation on the role of emotions and affect in making a schizophrenia diagnosis. Drawing on patient files from the Burghölzli psychiatric clinic in Zurich in the early 20th century, he provided us with an insight into how disease categories are made, more often than not based on the observations of patients’ emotional behaviours, that would consequently be described as the displays of their “affective self”. Georgia Katakou (2nd year History researcher) presented on love and friendship in the letters of Zogia Chronaki. She challenged us to think of friendship as both a feeling and a political relationship, evident especially in the emotional community of the Greek Left milieu between 1975 and 1989.
Rob Boddice commented on all the presentations, giving us insights into the troubled category of the “authentic”, extracting emotions from historical sources and dealing with the representations of emotions, which are always mediated in one way or another, and the role of emotions in the attitude a historian assumes towards their past subjects. As such, the masterclass proved formative not just for historians of emotions and senses, but also for historians at large.
About the speaker: Prof. Rob Boddice is a senior researcher at the Centre for the History of Experience (HEX) in Finland. His work focuses on the history of experience and of medicine, and specifically on the history of pain and medical experimentation. He has previously held positions at Harvard University, McGill University, the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, and Freie Universität Berlin. His recent books include Humane Professions: The Defence of Experimental Medicine, 1876-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Feeling Dis-Ease in Modern History: Experiencing Medicine and Illness (Bloomsbury, 2022), edited with Bettina Hitzer, Knowing Pain: A History of Sensation, Emotion and Experience (Polity, 2023), and The History of Emotions (Manchester University Press, 2024).
16-17.03.2025
Philippa Carter — Book Manuscript Workshop
Abstract: In this workshop, the History of Science and Medicine Working Group hosted Dr Philippa Carter (Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge), to discuss the manuscript of her book-in-progress, Frenzy: Madness, Brain Disease and the Soul in Early Modern England. As the manuscript is based on her recently defended PhD thesis, we had an opportunity to ask Philippa Carter questions on how to turn a doctoral thesis into a book in a separate Q&A session. This was a valuable occasion to reflect on how a dissertation is different from a book in terms of style, structure, and intended audience, how to engage with academic publishers, and how to translate one’s research into engaging narratives suitably positioned in a field and appealing to both professional and popular audiences.
Philippa Carter’s emerging book, spanning intellectual and cultural history of medicine, studies the history of "frenzy", defined by early modern medical practitioners “both as a form of mental illness and as a brain disease”. Explained to consist in the “inflammation of the brain” and manifesting in dramatic changes of speech and behaviour, frenzy was perceived as a proof of fragility of a person’s reason, understanding, and will, a considerable threat to personal integrity. In broader terms, it posed a challenge not just for medical inquiry, or long-standing theological tenets of the immortality of the soul – it transformed interpersonal relations and social orders from the level of family to that of the state. The study of frenzy offers a window into the complex understanding of diseases in early modern England, between philosophical issues of soul and personhood, anatomical and medical questions around brain dissections, and legal and political meanings of diagnosis.
Each of the working group members commented on a different chapter of Philippa Carter’s manuscript. Timo Houtekamer (4th year History researcher) and Mónica Morado Vázquez (3rd year History researcher) offered remarks on the chapter devoted to diagnosing frenzy in the context of both received and innovated medical philosophy of early modern English practitioners. Yijie Huang (postdoctoral researcher from the University of Heidelberg) and Maxime Guttin (4th year History researcher) commented the chapter on anatomizing the brain in the search for the physical seat of frenzy. Beatrice Bottomley (postdoctoral researcher from the University of Bologna) discussed the chapter on the theological implications of frenzy in the debate on the immortality of the soul, while Jakub Ochociński (2nd year History researcher) commented the chapter on ascribing and denying intentionality in legal cases involving frenzied subjects’ self-imposed deaths. Ewa Zakrzewska (2nd year History researcher) discussed the chapter on reinstating the victims of frenzy to the order of reason in different social environments, and Marie Van Haaster (3rd year History researcher) commented the chapter on the accusations of frenzy as weaponized in the politics of the early modern English state and church.
About the speaker: Dr Philippa Carter is a historian of early modern Europe and the Atlantic world (c. 1400–1800), with particular interests in medicine, natural knowledge, belief, and the body. She holds the post of the University Assistant Professor in the History of Medicine and Health before 1800 at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. She is currently working on a book entitled Frenzy: Madness, Brain Disease and the Soul in Early Modern England, and serves as the Associate Editor on the digital humanities project Reading Early Medicine.
10.04.2025
Paola Bertucci — Material Histories and the Silences of Collections
April 10, Emeroteca, Badia Fiesolana
Abstract: In this masterclass, Prof. Paola Bertucci (Yale University) shared insights that lead to a new approach for science and technology museum collections. Informed by the perspective of her corresponding roles as a professor in the history of science, technology and medicine and the curator of the History of Science and Technology Division at Yale University’s Peabody Museum, she drew on her experience involving both theoretical and practical experience with objects.
Together, we reflected on what are the possibilities and limitations of writing histories of science, medicine and colonialism based on existing collections, predominantly in the context of university museums of science and technology. How to confront the silences of collections? How to move beyond the geographical and temporal boundaries set by provenance, date, maker, and other data usually present in museum labels? How do you create narratives on a museum scale faced with limited accessibility to relevant objects, and attempting not to replicate dated assumptions of the museum’s founders and donators? How do you bring forth the object’s material qualities as telling parts of its story? How to tell histories of non-survival of objects? How do we incorporate the stories of their – frequently enslaved – makers and users, erased or neglected by archival records? Prof. Bertucci emphasized the researchers’ and curators’ responsibility for tackling those challenges, reminding us that “objects do not talk, we make them talk” and that “we need to decide what we want the objects to say”.
About the speaker: Paola Bertucci is a professor in the Department of History and in the History of Science and Medicine Program at Yale University. Her research focuses on science, technology, and medicine in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, mostly in Europe. She is the author of Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (Yale University Press, 2017), which looks at the Enlightenment from the perspective of learned artisans and argues for the centrality of the mechanical arts in French colonial and commercial projects. Artisanal Enlightenment was awarded the 2019 Louis Gottschalk prize from ASECS. Her most recent book, In the Land of Marvels. Science, Fabricated Realities, and Industrial Espionage in the Age of the Grand Tour (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023) examines the relationship between eighteenth-century science and information cultures through the lens a medical controversy and its life on the printed page. In the Land of Marvels received the 2025 Paul Bunge prize for best book on the history of scientific instruments. She is the president of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
16-17.06.2025
Where the Stones Lie: between historical practices and spatialities (Organised by Alexandre Claude and Leonardo Ariel Cataldi Carrió)
June 16-17, Sala del Torrino, Villa Salviati
Abstract: This one-and-a-half-day workshop, organised by the Visual and Material History Working Group in collaboration with LARHRA-CNRS (Lyon, France), sought to situate the understanding of lithic entities through their natural history, socio-technical, and confessional frameworks.
History tends to be increasingly nourished by material, anthropological, and ecological approaches to the past. From this perspective, the Visual and Material History Working Group, in collaboration with LARHRA-CNRS (Lyon, France), brought together a variety of historians and scholars from different backgrounds (history of knowledge, literary studies, social history, anthropology) to rework the comprehension of earth materials and the underground environment by early modern and modern actors.
The speakers and discussants reflected on how these main frameworks, among others, were challenged, across Europe and beyond, by the significant enlargement of the diversity of lithic entities since the early modern period. In particular, they discussed how Earth’s materials rooted “the local” and challenged other socio-spatial configurations under historical construction (regional hinterlands, long-distance or global geographies). In other words, by studying practices of extraction, crafting, and classification of stones, the workshop’s participants sought to understand how different forms of spatiality were territorialised. The analysis of these processes of appropriations and experiences with lithic materials opened the perspective over how these operations give depth, relief, and, in some cases, life, to ideas about the (under)ground, the land, and the Earth itself, as evident in the workshop’s fervent discussions. The conference was complemented by a visit to the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence.
12.03.2025
Marek Maj — Knowledge and Agency in Midwifery Work in Early Nineteenth Century Kraków
28.04.2025
Objects in Conversation: Giardino di Boboli
April 28, Giardino di Boboli
Abstract: Objects in Conversation is a series of events organized by fellows at the Kunsthistorisches Institut Florenz to promote object-centered, in situ discussion of sites and artefacts in Florence. Its aim is to foster conversations across research interests and with attention to issues of materiality, facture, objecthood, and experiential approaches.
The second edition was held in the Boboli Gardens, focussing especially on its grottoes and the diverse materialities – from stone to water and air – that make up these subterranean spaces. Galaad van Daele of KHI and Rose Byfleet and Alexandre Claude of the EUI’s Department of History shared insights into their research and initiated discussion between the members of both the Kunsthistorisches Institut and the EUI.
Galaad van Daele (KHI Florenz/ETH Zürich)
Beside its grottoes, whose rustic expression and porous materiality make some of the links between architecture and geological materiality visible, Boboli is itself also a space of extraction. Starting from the Grotta Grande, and moving around the garden, this visit will allow to witness some of the dependencies to the underground at play inside of the landscape and architecture of the park. This site, and the stops we will take while walking around it, will open up reflections on the way architecture – but also material culture at large – are permeated at all times by geological substances and dynamics.
Rose Byfleet (EUI Florence/Monash University)
Air played a vital role in the management of health in Early Modern Italy. Part of Eleonora de Toledo’s motivation for purchasing Palazzo Pitti and its gardens was to access the cleaner air of the Oltrarno. Yet grottoes introduce a paradox into sixteenth-century garden design: while the scented air of the garden above evoked health and pleasure, the cold, damp air within grottoes mimicked the dangerous, stagnant atmosphere of caves. As we move through the Boboli Gardens and their grottoes, I will open a conversation about the materiality of air and smell, adding a multisensory dimension to our exploration.
Alexandre Claude (EUI Florence/Hertziana Rome)
The grottoes of the Boboli garden are, to a certain extent, temples celebrating the formation and virtues of sedimentary rocks. Some of these rocks were indeed extracted in the nearby area of the garden. For all that, metamorphic and igneous rocks also played a role in the Medici landscape rhetoric; and some of the items displayed in the garden (columns, obelisks, sculptures, fountains, etc) give us an insight into the uses the Medici made of marble, porphyry, and granite. In this regard, the Boboli garden echoes the (lithic) embellishment of Florence, as well as the exploitation of the grand duchy's geological resources that the first three grand dukes carried out with passion. Our walk in the garden will thus be an invitation to go hillwalking in Tuscany.
06.03.2025
Vigdis Evang — Printing Plague Knowledge: Early Printed Plague Tracts (1472-1520)
PhD thesis defence by Vigdis Andrea Baugstø Evang
March 6, Sala del Torrino, Villa Salviati
Abstract: What kind of plague knowledge was available during the early age of print, and why did it take the form it did?
It would seem to us today that the Black Death must have presented the medical practitioners of that time with an unsolvable riddle, as what was for them a novel disease spread so quickly, so widely, and killed so many. In fact, the university-educated physicians of the 14th century were able to provide what was for them a satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon. Over the course of the following centuries, as plague grew to become a familiar, recurring threat, these explanations circulated in the form of plague tracts; a stable genre which provided the reader with both theoretical explanation and practical advice.
This thesis examines a corpus of plague tracts from the early age of print, when Gutenberg’s invention introduced new actors into the webs of knowledge production and circulation in the form of printers. It asks why these texts contain the elements they do, arguing that the plague tract genre is in fact a composite one, consisting of three sub-genres (the tractatus, regimen and consilium) drawing on different aspects of the learned doctor’s professional knowledge. Which aspects were accentuated and which diminished or removed entirely corresponds to the various needs of authors, printers, and potential buyers. The early printed plague tracts were shaped by a number of concerns and incentives, and as they were published, they would in turn shape the conditions for further publication in the same genre.
By examining a genre of medical writing at a time of transition, this thesis seeks to describe how patterns of thought and patterns of publication together created knowledge practices that carry an especial interest today, as we, too, adjust to new forms of information technology.
Examiners: Prof. Ann Thomson (European University Institute, Supervisor); Prof. Lauren Kassell (European University Institute); Prof. Unn Falkeid (University of Oslo); Prof. Andrew Pettegree (University of St Andrews).
16.01.2025 – 13.03.2025
Lauren Kassell and Cambridge History of Medicine Editors — History of Medicine Seminar
Once dominated by progressive narratives written by retired practitioners focused on national contexts, over the past fifty years the history of medicine has become a recognized field within the historical discipline on an international stage. It has been written as intellectual, social, and cultural history, and relates to historical demography and the histories of representation and material culture, gender history, and the history of science. More recently, it is associated with disability history and environmental history and sometimes folded together with medical humanities. In the process, the history of medicine has been extended to include broad definitions of health and healing, spanning the spectrum of living beings from microbes to humans, and extending to life and death. Yet despite its capaciousness and its formalization within university departments and learned societies, and codification within, respectively, the courses they teach and the journals and books they publish, the history of medicine remains eclectic as a professional category, instantiated differently depending on national and institutional context and topic of specialization.
Prompted by the simple interrogatives who? what? why? and where?, the first four sessions of the seminar considered foundational arguments within the history of medicine under the headings “Patients and Practitioners”; “Beings, Bodies and Minds”; “Health and Disease”; “Places, Institutions and Networks”. The remaining six sessions were organised chronologically, following the structure of the volumes. Each pair of volume editors—Rebecca Flemming and Laurence Totelin, Zubin Mistry and Ahmed Ragab, Elaine Leong and Alisha Rankin, Suman Seth and Yi-Li Wu, Rana Hogarth and Projit Mukharji, Guillaume Lachenal and Dora Vargha—led a discussion about what makes the history of medicine distinctive in their period of study. The seminar’s participants had an opportunity to discuss the drafts of introductions to the respective volumes’, as an exercise in both imagining the boundaries of history of medicine and understanding collaborative academic writing.
The seminar introduced its participants to the history of medicine and encouraged critical reflection on what medicine means, as an ideal and as a reality. It also addressed the challenges of studying a ‘scientific’ discipline and writing a ‘global’ history that begins in 3000 BCE and runs to the present day. Most importantly, however, it modelled approaches, building on multiple historiographical traditions, to a plural and decentred vision of history that complicates Eurocentric narratives of progress.
17.10.2024-21.05.2025
Lauren Kassell and Jakub Ochocinski — Monthly Virtual Casebooks Therapy Reading Group