Gianna Pomata, Ph.D.

Institute of the History of Medicine      The Johns Hopkins University     1900 East Monument Street     Baltimore, MD 21205     United States         Phone: 410-955-3037     E-mail: gpomata1@jhmi.edu

    
Research:

   Before coming to Hopkins in 2007, I have taught for many years at the Universities of Minnesota and of Bologna. My research interests include Renaissance and early modern European social and cultural history, with a focus on early modern medical cultures and practices (healer/patient relationship, medicine and religion, humanistic medicine). I have also a long-standing interest in women’s and gender history, the history of the body, the history of historical writing (in particular, the history of women historians).

   I have just completed a critical edition and translation of  Oliva Sabuco’s The True Medicine, for the Series “The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe”. This text is one of the very few medical works published under a woman’s name in early modern Europe. Besides providing an annotated translation from Spanish into English, I discuss in the Introduction the controversial issue of the book’s authorship, and I locate the book in the context of early modern medicine and of the Querelle des femmes.

Most recently, I have worked on the history of epistemic categories, genres, and practices in early modern medicine, with particular attention to medical empiricism and scepticism. In several articles, I have examined medicine’s contribution to the rise of observation as an epistemic category and practice in early modern Europe. This work has been carried out within a group project on the history of scientific observation sponsored by the Max-Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin. I plan to expand and develop this research work in a book tentatively titled “A Science of Individuals: Cases and Case-Histories in Early Modern Medical Culture”.  

   Other ongoing work includes a book project on Holy Bodies in Early Modern Medicine and Religion. Using 17th and 18th-century canonization records, this project examines how the cult of the saints’ bodies faced the scrutiny of early modern medicine and natural philosophy. More generally, I’m interested in how new concepts and rules of evidence were developed at the intersection of early modern medicine and religion. This project builds on my previous work on the history of the concept of “fact” (see Fatti: storie dell’evidenza empirica, 2001) and on the cultural history of the body.  

   I am also continuing research for another book to be titled Historia Medica: the Role of Humanist Culture in the Origins of Modern Medicine. This project investigates how early modern physicians and anatomists used the scholarly skills derived from their humanist training to develop new forms of observation and communication. This project builds on previous work of mine on the category of Historia in early modern medicine (see the volume I co-edited with Nancy Siraisi, Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe, 2005).

   I also keep happily pursuing a long-standing interest of mine in the history of women historians and of women’s history as a field, a result of which was the essay “Rejoinder to Pygmalion. The Origins of Women’s History at the London School of Economics” (2005). Lately I have been writing and giving presentations on women who contributed significantly to twentieth-century historical writing, though they often worked at the margins of the discipline, as independent scholars with no academic affiliation. I plan to  collect these essays in a volume to be called They Captured the Castle: Independent Women Scholars in 20th Century Historiography.

Recent Publications

Books:

Oliva Sabuco de Nantes Barrera, The True Medicine, edited and translated by Gianna Pomata (Toronto: Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2010) in press

 Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005, co-edited with Nancy G. Siraisi)

 I monasteri femminili come centri di cultura fra Rinascimento e Barocco (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2005, co-edited with Gabriella Zarri).

The Faces of Nature in Enlightenment Europe ( Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2003, co-edited with Lorraine Daston)

Contracting a Cure: Patients, Healers, and the Law in Early Modern Bologna (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998; Italian edition: La promessa di guarigione: malati e curatori in antico regime, Bologna, secoli XVI-XVIII, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1994.)

Selected Articles:

Forthcoming 2010: “Sharing Cases: the Observationes in Early Modern Medicine”, in Early Science and Medicine, 2 (2010), (accepted for publication)

Forthcoming 2010: “Observation Rising: Birth of an Epistemic Genre, ca. 1500-1650” in Histories of Scientific Observation, ed. Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck, Chicago: University of Chicago Press (accepted for publication)

“A Word of the Empirics: The Ancient Concept of Observation and its Recovery in Early Modern Medicine”, submitted for publication in Annals of Science (under review)

2009: “Feminism as Integral to the History of Humanism” in Humanism in Intercultural Perspective: Experiences and Expectations, ed. Jörn Rüsen and Henner Laass, Humanism in the Age of Globalization,  Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, vol. 1, pp. 167-176.

2008: “Dalla biografia alla storia e ritorno: Iris Origo tra Bloomsbury e Toscana”, in Genesis, Rivista della Società Italiana delle Storiche, 6:1 (2008),  pp. 117-157.

2007: “Malpighi and the Holy Body: Medical Experts and Miraculous Evidence in Seventeenth-Century Italy”, in Renaissance Studies, 21/4 (2007), pp. 568-586 (also published in  ed. Sandra Cavallo and David Gentilcore

2005:  “Praxis historialis: the uses of historia in early modern medicine” in Gianna Pomata and Nancy Siraisi, eds., Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, Mass., MIT University Press, pp. 105-146.

2005 : “Medicina delle monache: pratiche terapeutiche nei monasteri femminili a Bologna in età moderna” in Gianna Pomata e Gabriella Zarri, eds., I monasteri femminili come centri di cultura fra Rinascimento e Barocco, Rome, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, pp. 329-363.

2005: “Medicine for the poor: health care and poor relief in 18th and 19th- century Bologna”, in Andrew Cunningham and Ole Grell, eds., Health Care and Poor Relief in 18th and 19th century Southern Europe, Aldershot, Ashgate, pp. 229-243.

2004: “Rejoinder to Pygmalion: the origins of women’s history at the London School of Economics” in History of Historiography, 46 (2004),  pp. 79-104.

2002: “Gender and the Family” in  Short Oxford History of Italy: Early Modern Italy 1550-1796, ed. John Marino, Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 69-86.

2002: “Knowledge-freshening Wind: Gender and the Renewal of  Renaissance Studies”, in Allan Grieco and Michael Rocke, eds., The Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century, Florence: Olschki, pp. 173-192.

2001: “Fatti: storie dell’evidenza empirica“ Quaderni Storici, 108, 3, 2001 (co-editor and co-author of Introduction with Simona Cerutti).

2001:“A Christian Utopia of  the Renaissance: Elena Duglioli’s Spiritual and Physical Motherhood (ca. 1510-1520) in Von der dargestellten Person zum erinnerten Ich: Europäisce Selbstzeugnisse als historische Quellen (1500-1850), ed. Kaspar von Greyerz, Hans Medick, Patrice Veit (Köln: Böhlau Verlag), pp. 323-353.

2001: “Menstruating Men: Similarity and Difference of the Sexes in Early Modern Medicine” in Valeria Finucci and Kevin Brownlee, eds., Generation and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and History from Antiquity to Early Modern Europe, Durham and London:Duke Univ. Press, pp. 109-152.

1999:  “Practicing Between Earth and Heaven: Women Healers in Early Modern Bologna” in Dynamis, 19, 1999, pp. 119-143 (also published in Spanish as “Entre el cielo y la tierra: las sanadoras en la Bolonia del siglo XVII” in Montserrat Cabré i Pairet and Teresa Ortiz Gómez, eds., Sanadoras, Matronas y Médicas en Europa, siglos XII-XX, Barcelona: Icaria, 2001).

Course syllabi:

- HST 140.105  History of Medicine: Antiquity to the Scientific Revolution  
  
- 150. 701: History of Medicine: Antiquity to the Scientific Revolution

- 140.418 Medicine for and by Women in Pre-Modern Europe

- 150. 813. Medicine and Science in History. A Survey of Historiography (co-taught with Marta Hanson)