Fall 2024 Colloquium - Melissa Reynolds

Abstract: Between 1400 and 1600, English readers gained increasing access to practical medical and scientific knowledge, first in vernacular manuscript collections, and later in inexpensive, printed books. As I argue in my first book, Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print, engagement with this knowledge—much of it very old—in recipes, prognostications, almanacs, and other pragmatic texts, encouraged English readers to see themselves as adjudicators and even progenitors of knowledge in their own right. This talk, however, drawn from the final chapter of the book, illustrates how Elizabethan readers reinterpreted the contents of fifteenth-century manuscripts to invent an “English” history of medicine and science and to argue for the supremacy of English ingenuity. While the democratization of medical and scientific knowledge in manuscripts and printed books did encourage an emergent culture of scientific curiosity among English readers, in this talk I argue that these same books also became sources for those who would use nature to define categories of exclusion.