History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning

The first book in a new series and a groundbreaking study of connections, parallels, and mutual interaction between two critical disciplines - medicine and history - in 15th- to 17th-century Europe.

A major, path-breaking work, History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning is Nancy Siraisi's examination into the intersections of medically trained authors and history, in the period 1450 to 1650. Rather than studying medicine and history as separate disciplinary traditions, Siraisi calls attention to their mutual interaction in the rapidly changing world of Renaissance erudition.

Far from their contributions being a mere footnote in the historical record, medical writers had extensive involvement in the reading, production, and shaping of historical knowledge. With remarkably detailed scholarship, Siraisi investigates doctors' efforts to explore the legacies handed down to them from ancient medical and anatomical writings, and the difficult reconciliations this required between the authority of the ancient world and the discoveries of the modern.

This book will be required reading for anyone engaged in the study of humanism, medicine, history, natural philosophy, or the history of knowledge in general.

"A fascinating study of Renaissance physicians as avid readers and enthusiastic writers of all kinds of history: from case narratives and medical biographies to archaeological and environmental histories. In this wide-ranging book, Nancy Siraisi demonstrates the deep links between the medical and the humanistic disciplines in early modern Europe."
--Katharine Park, Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University
"Historians of medicine and of historiography alike will read her book with pleasure and profit."
--Brian W. Ogilvie, Renaissance Quarterly
"This is a salient but little explored aspect of renaissance humanism, and there is no doubt that Siraisi has succeeded in throwing light onto a vast subject. This is a major book, well written, richly learned and with further implications for more than students of medical history."
--Vivian Nutton, Professor, The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College London

Nancy G. Siraisi is one of the preeminent scholars of medieval and Renaissance intellectual history. Now Distinguished Professor Emerita of History at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center, and a 2008 winner of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, her books include The Clock and the Mirror (1997), and the widely used textbook Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine (1990), which won the Davis Prize from the History of Science Society. In 2004 she received the Renaissance Society of America's Paul Oskar Kristellar Award, and in 2005 she received the American Historical Association Award for Scholarly Distinction.

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