About

Hannah Marcus is a Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University and serves as the Faculty Director of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments. Her research concentrates on the scientific culture of early modern Europe between 1400 and 1700, with particular focus on the history of science and medicine, the relationship between faith and science, and communication technologies during this period. Marcus's first book, Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy, explores the censorship of medical books during the Counter-Reformation and was awarded the Morris D. Forkosch Prize and the Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize. She is also the translator of Camilla Erculiani’s Letters on Natural Philosophy, which presents a materialist explanation for the Biblical flood and was recognized with an Honorable Mention for the Scholarly Edition in Translation Award. Her second book, Methuselah’s Children, examines ideas about longevity and old age in the Renaissance. Marcus engages in digital humanities research, collaborating on projects related to Galileo’s correspondence and the history of contagious disease. She earned her BA from the University of Pennsylvania and her PhD from Stanford University in 2016. At Harvard, she teaches courses on the evolution of scientific ideas from the medieval to early modern periods and supervises graduate students working on science in premodernity.

Research topics

• History
• Sociology
• Humanities
• Political Science
• Art
• Geodesy
• Psychology
• Law
• Classics
• Gender studies
• Ancient history
• Art history
• Geography

Selected publications

• A history of rules and the rules of history

  Metascience · 2023-06-21

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• Long life: Aging and the anxieties of longevity from the premodern to the present

  Endeavour · 2023-09-01 · 2 citations

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• Knowing Old Age in the Renaissance: Medicine, Poetry, and Spirituality in Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Encyclopedia of Old Age

  Journal of the History of Ideas · 2023-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Over more than thirty years the Bolognese botanist, natural historian, and physician Ulisse Aldrovandi compiled his Pandechion epistemonicon-a manuscript encyclopedia composed of pasted note slips drawn from books he was reading. This article examines the 580 slips that comprise Aldrovandi's Pandechion entry on old age. The entry allows us to examine how an early modern physician and his intellectual community approached old age as an epistemological problem with medical, poetic, and spiritual dimensions. Aldrovandi's engagement with old age in the Pandechion presents a fluid set of disciplinary boundaries for how we understand old age in the past and present.

  PublisherDOI

• Beheading the Hydra: Antonio Castelvetro, The Congregation of the Index, and an Imagined Future for Print Censorship

  Religions · 2023-05-06

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In 1587, Antonio Castelvetro, a little-known physician from a well-known Modenese family, circulated a manuscript treatise that proposed a radical new vision for a Catholic press and a reformed system of press censorship: The Brief Treatise on the Reform of the Press (Trattato breve sopra la riforma della stampa). Historians have typically treated this text with a combination of amusement and outright ridicule, but this essay explains the ways that Castelvetro’s text captured a particular ethos of expertise and reform at the end of the sixteenth century in Italy. Although never implemented, Castelvetro’s treatise represents a moment of creative tactics in confrontation with the hydra of print. Censorship lay firmly within the project of the Counter-Reformation—a response directed at undermining and controlling the immediate and long-term effects of religious upheaval across Europe. However, systemic solutions to managing the press were part of the creative process of Catholic Reform. As Castelvetro’s treatise shows, some of these suggestions were more far-fetched and self-aggrandizing than others, but each contributed to a flourishing landscape of ideas aimed at combatting heresy and restructuring Catholic life.

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• Memories of Plague in Early Modern Italy

  2021-07-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The Countway Library at Harvard holds a copy of a first-hand account of the public health measures enacted by the city of Bologna's government during the devastating plague epidemic of 1630.

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• Gender, Health, and Healing, 1250–1550

  The Journal of Interdisciplinary History · 2021 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • History

  In the afterword to this volume, Naama Cohen-Hanegbi describes this book as about “women’s health and women’s roles in healthcare” in the late Middle Ages and early modernity (316). Substantial recent research, including books and articles by editors Ritchey and Strocchia, has enhanced our understanding of both subjects. The chapters in this volume demonstrate how a wide historical gaze and careful contextual analysis of texts and images can better position the healing of women and women healers as central concerns in the history of medicine.The volume presents a series of case studies with overlapping interests and distinct methodologies, styles, and presentations. The geography of the chapters spans much of continental Europe and even includes two essays focused on the medieval Islamic world and the early Ottoman Empire. The opening section engages with religious healing—calling our attention to how religious rituals performed by women were part of the apparatus of healing. The next section contains four chapters, three of which focus on Italian subjects, to examine how medical knowledge was produced and transmitted through texts. The third grouping of chapters, which foregrounds care for the ill, shares considerable thematic ground with the first two chapters about religious healing. The final section of the book approaches issues of reproduction. The volume begins with a broad introduction and concludes with an afterword pointing to directions for future research.The subjects of women’s health and women caregivers, which too often have been absent from historical writing, require interdisciplinary analysis, and women as practitioners have often been obscured in the historical record. Methodologically, these chapters can be divided into two groups beyond the subject headings that structure the volume, according to whether their argument is primarily (1) textual or (2) contextual. The primarily textual essays identify the textual sources of women’s health and healing and explain how they fit into the late medieval and early modern intellectual landscape. This is not to say that these textually grounded chapters lack context. On the contrary, their strength often lies in how their authors draw out details about social and cultural milieus by examining the transformation of texts as they crossed cultural, social, geographical, and temporal terrain.The primarily contextual essays are exercises in looking obliquely at snippets of text, reading silence, and arriving at informed historical inference from a deep understanding of the social, cultural, intellectual, and (less often) economic contexts that surround a particular reference, document, or practice. The challenge in this worthy enterprise is providing compelling evidence to non-specialist readers who do not share the authors’ own deep expertise. In a few instances, the authors did not sufficiently equip readers with the breadth of understanding that this kind of argument demands.The chapters raise a broader methodological question for historians, literary scholars, art historians, and scholars of religious studies: After excavating such stories, how can we alter our histories of women’s health and healing to make them the central subjects and characters that they clearly were? Experiences of health and healing have always been gendered, albeit in ways that are fundamentally unstable and change over time. This volume is another push to treat gender in the history of medicine as a central analytical category rather than a niche interest.In that vein, a number of the contributions in this volume contain transcriptions, translations, and reproductions of primary sources that will serve as important resources in our classrooms, where we must teach histories that are more inclusive and representative. The Italian recipes for breast care, early Ottoman instructions for therapeutic baths, images from German surgery manuals, and excerpts from gynecological treatises in the medieval Islamic world will add texture and nuance to our portrayals of health and healing in past societies. I, for one, will never again teach Latin translations of Ibn Sina without the historiated initial depicting him holding a disembodied breast at the start of the section “de mamilla.”

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• : <i>The Institutionalization of Science in Early Modern Europe</i>

  Renaissance Quarterly · 2021-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The Institutionalization of Science in Early Modern Europe. Giulia Giannini and Mordechai Feingold, eds. Scientific and Learned Cultures and Their Institutions 27. Leiden: Brill, 2020. xii + 301 pp. €115. - Volume 74 Issue 4

  PublisherDOI

• Shattering crystal with crystal: Galileo’s rhetoric, lenses, and the epistemology of metaphor

  History of Science · 2021-10-05

  article1st authorCorresponding

  ) have often been treated, and even translated, interchangeably. In this article, we argue that Galileo used references to crystals as lenses to embed epistemological and cosmological arguments in the material object of the telescope. Across Galileo's correspondence and letters, the term crystal had many uses and meanings. As a substance, crystal was a form of raw material, but crystal was also a substance that was central to scholastic cosmology and an explanatory device on which scholastics relied to explain first the appearance of the new star of 1604 and then Galileo's new telescopic discoveries. When Galileo began using the word crystals as a synonym for lenses, he endowed the material of his instrument with cosmological arguments. Galileo's choice of language was deliberate and polemical, serving as a joke at the expense of scholastics and as a linguistic marker of social proximity to Galileo and his intellectual agenda, especially among the members of the Academy of the Lincei. Rhetorically and linguistically, Galileo chose to refer to his lenses as crystals both because of the material from which they were made and because in so doing he signaled the epistemological work that the lenses would perform. Ultimately, the crystal lenses in Galileo's telescope and writings shattered the crystalline spheres, replacing explanatory metaphors with a polemical emphasis on the material and empirical realities of objects.

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• Epilogue

  2020-01-01

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  Abstract The epilogue turns from medicine to follow the themes of utility and professional expertise in the Catholic Church's response to Copernican astronomy in 1616 and in Galileo's reply to Copernicus's censor (Francesco Ingoli) in his Dialogue of 1632. The decision to expurgate Copernicus's De revolutionibus centered on the work's perceived utility. Galileo was acutely aware of these contemporary conversations and disputes concerning expurgation, expertise, and the professional utility of knowledge. Foregrounding the context, processes, and people involved in expurgation brings new issues to light in Galileo's framing of his Dialogue, revealing the ubiquity of the censor as an interlocutor throughout the Galileo affair.

  PublisherDOI

• Sharon T. Strocchia. <i>Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy</i>. (I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History.) ix + 330 pp., figs., notes, bibl., index. Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard University Press, 2019. $49.95 (cloth); ISBN 9780674241749.

  Isis · 2020 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Humanities
  • Classics
  • Art
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Paula Findlen

  Stanford University

  4 shared

• Price

  1 shared

• Caroline S. Wechsler

  Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

  1 shared

• Crystal Hall

  1 shared

• P O Roberts

  1 shared

• S.L. Lerman

  1 shared

Labs

• Hannah Marcus LabPI

Awards & honors

• Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the best first book in intellec…
• Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize in Italian History by the…
• Honorable Mention for the Scholarly Edition in Translation A…