From time to time the Society of Italian Historical Studies (SIHS) awards a citation to a historian whose career has made a particularly outstanding contribution to knowledge and understanding of the history of Italy. In 2016 the Society wishes to acknowledge the intellectual achievements of Katharine Park, Emerita Samuel Zemurray, Jr. and Doris Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, in the study of women, gender and science. A historian of medieval and early modern Italy, Professor Park’s research has focused on the history of science and medicine with particular attention to gender, sexuality, and the history of the body in pre-modern Italy and Europe.
By combining painstaking archival research, conceptual daring, and imaginative argumentation, Professor Park’s scholarship has reshaped our understanding of science, medicine, the female body and sexuality in pre-modern societies in all their complexity. During the last thirty years, her research has energized and broadened conventional ways of studying the history of medicine and science. Drawing on anthropology, literary studies, sociological theories, and art history, her work spans five centuries, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. While raising important questions about the relationship between doctors and their patients, humanists and artisans, religion and anatomy, allegorical imagery and natural philosophy, Park has provided insights into what they all reveal about the intersection of formal scientific learning and medical empirical practice; women’s bodies and men’s attempts to know them; and the intricate relationship between medicine, the female body and sexuality in early modernity.
In one group of works, including her first monograph Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence, Professor Park explored the intersection of the scholastic medical learning of university-educated professionals with the work of artisanal and empirical male and female practitioners, situating them within the social, institutional, and cultural contexts in which they grew and that produced them. Professor Park has further illuminated the connection between scientific learning and practice in more recent articles, as well as in her recent monograph, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection. In this fascinating book, by mining Italian texts and images from the thirteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries, Park studies medical techniques of human autopsy and dissection showing how they grew out of empirical practices such embalming, forensic autopsies, midwifing procedures, and obstetrical surgery. She argues that medical techniques concerning the study of copses grew simultaneously with interest in women’s sexuality and generation or, as it was called, “women’s secrets.” Professor Park is currently working on two separate projects which expand her research to include the ongoing circulation of people, knowledge, objects, and texts between the Islamicate lands and Latin Christian Europe, and broaden the study of science to sensory inquiry.
Her scholarly production, which includes three monographs, two edited collections, as well as numerous articles, has been translated into Italian, German and French and has been recognized by an array of prizes, awards and fellowships including among others, the Pfizer Award of the History of Science Society, the Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize by the History of Science Society (2007) and the Roland H. Bainton Book Prize (1999); a Research Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2003) and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2000. In 2001, Professor Park was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Professor Park has long bolstered and supported Italian studies through her outstanding service to the field in a wide variety of editorial positions and professional organizations. In summary, Professor Park’s intellectual breath, methodological innovation and remarkable generosity have inspired and encouraged new generations of scholars to pursue research and redefine the fields of science and medicine.
Giovanna Benadusi (Chair, SIHS Citation Committee)
Dario Gaggio
Sarah Ross