Biography

Katharine Park is Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor emerita of the History of Science at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the history of medieval and early modern European science and medicine, with special attention to Italy and the Mediterranean, and the history of women and gender. Her books include Doctors and Medicine in Renaissance Florence (Princeton University Press 1985), Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1250-1750, co-authored with Lorraine Daston (Zone Books, 1997), and Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (Zone Books, 2006). With Lorraine Daston she also coedited The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3: Early Modern Science (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Project Summary

Historians of medieval and early modern science tend to study the literature of Arabic, Greek and Latin science in isolation from one another. This project aims to produce a synthetic account of the history of science and medicine in western Eurasia focusing on the Mediterranean region 800-1600 and suitable for a non-specialist audience of students and scholars. Each of the chronologically arranged chapters centers on a particular object of knowledge associated with a particular place at a particular time. Chapters completed to date discuss the elephant sent to Charlemagne by the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, cinnamon as a trade good and culinary and medicinal ingredient, the month of March in the Calendar of Córdoba, the map of Sicily in al-Idrisi’s atlas, and the hospital of St. John in twelfth-century Jerusalem. Topics to be addressed at I Tatti currently include falcons in Emperor Frederick II’s On the Art of Hunting with Birds, and zero as a mathematical tool, sign and concept.