People
Katharine Park
Samuel Zemurray, Jr. and Doris Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor of the History of Science
Katharine Park, Samuel Zemurray, Jr. and Doris Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, works on the cultural, social, and intellectual history of science and medicine in the European Middle Ages and Renaissance. She is the author of Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence (Princeton University Press, 1985) and Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (Zone Books, 2006), and co-author with Lorraine Daston of Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (Zone Books, 1998). She and Daston have also co-edited volume 3 of The Cambridge History of Science (Cambridge University Press, 2006), on science in early modern Europe. In 1999, Wonders of Nature won the Pfizer Award of the History of Science Society for the best book in the history of science; it has appeared in Italian and German translations. Secrets of Women won the Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women and Science Prize of the HSS in 2007. Park continues to work on the history of gender, sexuality, and the female body in medieval and Renaissance Europe, as well as categories and practices of experience and observation in the Middle Ages.
Park received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in the History of Science, an M.Phil. from the University of London (Warburg Institute) in Combined Historical Studies of the Renaissance, and a B.A. from Radcliffe College in History and Literature (Renaissance and Reformation).
Articles
- (with Lorraine J. Daston) "Unnatural Conceptions: Monsters in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France and England," Past and Present 92 (1981): 20-54.
- (with Lorraine J. Daston) "Hermaphrodites in Renaissance France," Critical Matrix 1 (1985): 1-19.
- (with Eckhart Kessler) "The Concept of Psychology," in Charles B. Schmitt et al., eds., The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, ch. 13.
- "The Organic Soul," in ibid., ch. 14.
- (with Robert A. Nye), "Destiny is Anatomy," essay review of Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990), The New Republic (18 February 1991): 53-57.
- (with John Henderson) "'The First Hospital among Christians': The Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova in Early Sixteenth-Century Florence," Medical History 35 (1991): 164-88.
- "Healing the Poor: Hospitals and Medical Assistance in Renaissance Florence," in Jonathan Barry and Colin Jones, eds., Medicine and Charity before the Welfare State, London: Routledge, 1991, 26-45.
- "Medicine and Society in Medieval Europe, 500-1500," in Andrew Wear, ed., Medicine in Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 59-90.
- "The Sensitive Corpse: Body and Self in Renaissance Medicine," Fenway Court, 1990-91, Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1992, 77-87.
- "The Black Death," in Kenneth F. Kiple, ed., The Cambridge World History of Human Disease, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 612-16.
- "Kimberly Bergalis, AIDS, and the Plague Metaphor," in Marjorie Garber, Jann Matlock, and Rebecca Walkowitz, eds., Media Spectacles, New York: Routledge, 1993, 232-53.
- "The Criminal and the Saintly Body: Autopsy and Dissection in Renaissance Italy," The Renaissance Quarterly 47 (1994): 1-33.
- "The Life of the Corpse: Dissection and Division in Late Medieval Europe," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 50 (1995): 111-32.
- (with Lorraine J. Daston) "The Hermaphrodite and the Orders of Nature: Sexual Ambiguity in Early Modern France," GLQ: 1 (1995): 419-38.
- “The Meanings of Natural Diversity: Marco Polo on the ‘Division‘ of the World,” in Edith Sylla and Michael R. McVaugh, eds., Texts and Contexts in Medieval Science: Studies on the Occasion of John E. Murdoch’s Seventieth Birthday, Leiden: Brill, 1997, 134-47.
- “The Rediscovery of the Clitoris: French Medicine and the Tribade, 1570-1620,” in Carla Mazzio and David Hillman, eds., The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, New York: Routledge, 1997, 171-93.
- “Masaccio’s Skeleton: Art and Anatomy in Renaissance Italy,” in Rona Goffen, ed., Masaccio’s Trinity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 119-40.
- “Eyes, Bones, and Hernias: Surgical Specialists in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Italy,” in Jon Arrizabalaga, ed., Medicine from the Black Death to the French Disease, London: Ashgate Press, 1998, 110-30.
- “Magic and Medicine: The Healing Arts,” in Judith C. Brown and Robert C. Davis, eds., Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, London: Addison Wesley Longman, 1998.
- “Impressed Images: Reproducing Wonders,” in Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison, eds., Picturing Science, Producing Art, New York: Routledge, 1998, 254-71.
- “Natural Particulars: Epistemology, Practice, and the Literature of Healing Springs,” in Anthony Grafton and Nancy G. Siraisi, eds., Natural Particulars: Nature and the Disciplines in Renaissance Europe, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1999, 347-67.
- “Dissecting the Female Body: From Women’s Secrets to the Secrets of Nature,” in Adele Seeff and Jane Donawerth, eds., Attending to Early Modern Women, Newark: University of Delaware Press; London/Toronto: Associated University Presses, 2000, 29-47.
- “Country Medicine in the City Marketplace: Snakehandlers in Renaissance Italy,” Renaissance Studies, 15 (2001): 104-20.
- “Was There a Renaissance Body?” in Walter Kaiser and Michael Rocke, eds., The Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century = I Tatti Studies, vol. 19, Florence: Olschki 2002, 21-35.
- “Nature in Person: Renaissance Allegories and Emblems,” in Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal, eds., The Moral Authority of Nature, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, 50-73.
- “Women, Gender, and Utopia,” in Focus section, “Getting Back to The Death of Nature: Rereading Carolyn Merchant,” Isis 97 (2006): 487-95.
Contact
- Email: park28@fas.harvard.edu
- Phone: (617) 495-9922
Classes
- HS 100: Knowing the World: An Introduction to the History of Science
- HS 112: Health, Medicine, and Healing in Medieval and Renaissance Europe
- HS 200: Knowing the World
- HS 201: Research Methods in the History of Science
- HS 215: Science and Culture in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe: Seminar
Books & Publications
- Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985
- (with Lorraine J. Daston), Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750, New York: Zone Books, 1998
- Secrets of Women - Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection
- (with Lorraine J. Daston, co-editor), The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3: Early Modern Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006
- Italian translation: Le meraviglie del mondo. Mostri, prodigi e fatti strani dal Medioevo all’Illuminismo, Rome: Carocci, 2000.
- German translation: Wunder und die Ordnung der Natur, 1150-1750, trans. S. Wohlfeil and Ch. Krueger, Frankfurt: Eichborn, 2002.
