Biography

Claire Seville Litt is a historian of early modern science and medicine. Her research explores the uses of gemstones in health, beauty, and ornamentation practices at the Medici court. After receiving her PhD from Queen’s University (2022), she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Science History Institute and a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania (2023-2024). She held a postdoctoral fellowship at Tufts University funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2024-2026). She is working on two book projects, A Princess Defamed: The Early Life and Disreputable Afterlife of Claudia de’ Medici and Jewels of Life: Health, Beauty, and the Gemstones of the Medici. Her work will appear in the forthcoming book, Encounters: Early Modern Food in 50 Objects (eds. Marta Manzanares Mileo and Laia Portet).

Project Summary

This project seeks to determine the transmission of recipes between alchemical and pharmaceutical manuscripts produced at the Medici court during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The aim of this research is both to improve scholarly understanding of these manuscripts and to identify trends in the prevalence of recipes and ingredients over time. Of particular interest to this project is the production of gemstone medicines and cosmetics, and alchemical procedures for making imitation and synthetic gemstones. Successive editions of the Florentine apothecary manual, the Ricettario fiorentino, provide insight into the increasing use of gems in sixteenth-century pharmacy. Contemporary experiments with gem-making in Florence are attested to by the works of the Florentine alchemist Antonio Neri, author of L’arte vetraria (1612), a guide to making coloured glass. Though Medicean manuscripts are similarly replete with gemstone medicines, make-ups, and recipes for making gems, the significance of these recipes are obscured by the lack of established relationship between manuscripts. This project will transcribe, catalogue, and cross-reference Medicean books of recipes to determine the transmission of recipes between them, providing insight into their relational significance that may in turn contextualize and provide greater meaning to their contents. This research strives to illuminate trends and meanings behind the uses and creation of gemstones by elite lay-practitioners of early modern medicine and alchemy.