Email: S.De-Renzi@open.ac.uk
Educated at the University of Bologna (Italy), I worked as a secondary school teacher and research fellow before joining the OU in 2000 as a lecturer in the history of medicine. Since 2003 I have held a 5-year Wellcome University Award to work on medicine in Counter Reformation Rome.
We live now in an age of growing ‘medicalization’, but in past societies medical knowledge had to compete with other notions and practices of health, from those of non-learned healers to religious perceptions of the body and soul. My research is about how physicians built their authority and used their medical competence in seventeenth-century Rome, a thriving courtly and urban society which was permeated by Catholic culture. Within this project I have also researched the history of post mortem and anatomical investigations, hospitals as sites of teaching and the beginning of legal medicine. Especially on the Continent early modern physicians and other medical practitioners often acted as expert witnesses and my aim is to make sense of when and why medical expertise was sought after in the courtroom and how physicians constructed their testimony.
Biographies and career trajectories of physicians are an important part of my research and I am member of the OU research cluster on Biographical Methodologies.
I contributed to the production of Medicine and Society in Europe, 1500-1930 (A218), of which I am now chair. The course team was the recipient of an Open University teaching award, in particular for the CD ROM. I also sit on the course teams of The Rise of Scientific Europe, 1500-1800 (AS208) and Perspectives on Leonardo da Vinci (A178).
I welcome students interested in any area of the history of medicine (1500-1800), both British and Continental European, and also in the broader area of early modern natural investigations. I would be happy to help identify good research topics.
I am an affiliated research scholar in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge.
Instruments in Print. Books from the Whipple Collection, Cambridge, Whipple Museum for the History of Science, 2000
‘Sapere anatomico negli ospedali romani: formazione dei chirurghi e pratiche sperimentali’ (with Maria Conforti), in Antonella Romano (ed.), La culture scientifique à Rome à l’époque moderne, Rome, Ècole française de Rome, forthcoming
‘Per una biografia di Paolo Zacchia: nuovi documenti e ipotesi di ricerca’, in Alessandro Pastore and Giovanni Rossi (eds.), Paolo Zacchia, 1584-1659. Alle origini della medicina legale, Milan, FrancoAngeli, forthcoming
‘Medical competence, anatomy and the polity in seventeenth-century Rome’, Renaissance studies, special issue on ‘Spaces, Objects and Identities in Early Modern Italian Medicine’, edited by David Gentilcore and Sandra Cavallo, 21 (2007), pp. 551-567
free at: www.blackwell-synergy.com
‘Medical Expertise, Bodies, and the Law in Early Modern Courts’, paper commissioned for the section ‘Focus’, ISIS, 98 (2007), pp. 315-322
www.journals.uchicago.edu/
‘Resemblance, Paternity and Imagination in Early Modern Courts’, in Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (eds.), Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology and Politics, 1500-1870, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2007, pp. 61-83
‘Un linceo alla Sapienza: la natura del fuoco e dei metalli in un’orazione di Johannes Faber’, in Andrea Battistini, Gilberto De Angelis, Giuseppe Olmi, (eds.), All’origine della scienza moderna: Federico Cesi e l’Accademia dei Lincei, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2007, pp. 271-316
‘The Sick and Their Healers’; ‘Policies of Health: Diseases, Poverty and Hospitals’; ‘Old and New Models of the Body’; ‘Women and Medicine’, in Peter Elmer (ed.), The Healing Arts. Health, Disease and Society in Europe 1500-1800, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2004
‘Witnesses of the body. Medico-legal cases in seventeenth-century Rome’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 33A (2002), pp. 219-242
‘La natura in tribunale. Conoscenze e pratiche medico-legali a Roma nel XVII secolo’, Quaderni Storici, 108 (2001), pp. 799-822
‘Writing and Talking of Exotic Animals’ in Marina Frasca Spada and Nick Jardine (eds.), Books and the Sciences in History, Cambridge, CUP, 2000, pp. 151-167
‘‘A Fountain for the Thirsty’ and a Bank for the Pope: Charity, Conflicts and Medical Careers at the Hospital of Santo Spirito in Seventeenth-Century Rome”, in Ole Grell, Andrew Cunningham & Jon Arrizabalaga (eds.), Health Care and Poor Relief in Counter-Reformation Europe, London, Routledge, 1999, pp. 102-131
See also Open Research Online for further details of Silvia De Renzi’s research publications.
