Galileo Galilei’s contemporaries repeatedly compared him to other famous men, such as Archimedes, Columbus, Vespucci, and Michelangelo. With these comparisons, contemporaries enhanced Galileo's fame, status and credibility, while also creating possibilities of understanding Galileo and his scholarship. In this paper I connect these comparisons to the concept of the scholarly persona, as developed by (among others) Daston, Sibum, and Algazi. The paper studies the significance of these comparisons as attempts to contribute to, shape and negotiate Galileo's scholarly persona. To better understand this mechanism, the paper first examines the various comparisons in the textual and material contexts in which they arose. The paper analyses the different personae assigned to Galileo, and the extent to which these were complementing or conflicting in nature. Secondly, the paper investigates the inherent tension with regard to these comparisons: while they helped advance Galileo's status as an individual scholar by embedding him in a tradition of great men, they simultaneously detracted from his unique genius by doing so. As such, the paper leads to a better understanding of the importance of fame for scholars, in particular in relation to their careers and credibility. Finally, by also taking the mythological figures Galileo was compared with into account, the paper highlights the different traditions at the basis of the cultures of scholarship and fame in early modern Europe. As such, it not only sheds light on the development and significance of Galileo's fame, but also on the developing persona of the seventeenth-century scholar in general.

In this paper I explore the relationship between skin, skin represented as fabric, and fabric covering skin within this context of seasonality in the representation of human bodies in anatomical works of the seventeenth century. I begin with engravings by Odoardo Fialetti, commissioned by Giulio Cesare Casseri, professor of anatomy at the University of Padua for his Tabula Anatomica (1627). These are some of the most remarkable examples of representational choice in the history of anatomy. The evidence of dissection is contrasted with plants and trees in the height of summer foliage. These images show people disrobing themselves of their skin, or as though an invisible hand were casting their skin aside like fabric. The conflation of skin with cloth in these images reinforces a paradoxically lively presentation of the cadaver, and blurs the relationship of the human body to the surrounding environment. This depiction is in remarkable contrast to the circumstances of bodily dissection in the early seventeenth century, which occurred by necessity in the winter. The seasonal experience of medical teaching at the time reflected the availability and ease of use for teaching materials. University medical education centered on the teaching of the experiential sciences of botany and anatomy. In this paper I analyse the practice of anatomy at Padua in the context of costume books and the fabric trade in the Republic of Venice. I show that the novelties of the early modern world and the novelties of anatomy are key in knowledge in Renaissance medicine.

The question of female self-starvation has been widely debated in the history of medicine and religion, with scholars such as Silverman (1983) anachronistically diagnosing “miraculous maids”—women who claimed to have miraculously survived without food for extended periods of time—as early cases of anorexia nervosa. Departing from the attempt to formulate a long history of anorexia nervosa, this paper addresses the issue of female self-starvation in the context of the cultural fascination with nutrition and digestion in religious and medical-scientific discourses of post-Civil War England, particularly attending to emerging theories of nutrition and digestion, such as Thomas Willis’ theory of fermentation. Specifically, this paper closely examines three cases of female abstinence and indigestion: the case of Martha Taylor as described in Thomas Hobbes’ letters, John Reynolds’ "Discourse on Prodigious Abstinence," and the several religious pamphlets that advertise her abstinence as a miracle; the two cases of “nervous Consumption” described by physician Richard Morton, and the case of Eve in John Milton’s "Paradise Lost," whose inability to abstain from eating the forbidden fruit caused, I argue, the first case of indigestion in Eden. Arguing that popular and medical-scientific discourse surrounding the prodigious abstinence of miraculous maids should be understood in a larger cultural pre-occupation with food, nutrition, and digestion—and in particular in the medical-scientific demystification of the female relation to food and digestion—this paper offers a closer examination of narratives of female abstinence and indigestion in seventeenth century England.

Fundamental to the work of William Hunter and his assistants at the Great Windmill Street school in London was the collecting of anatomical preparations. Not only were these preparations vital to teaching at the school, their making provided visual and tactile information that was the basis for many of the anatomical discoveries associated with the school. Diseased body parts were collected as part of this anatomical work throughout Hunter’s lifetime, as they were seen to provide insights into regular anatomy. This changed when Hunter’s nephew, Matthew Baillie, took over the school (with William Cruikshank) and reconceptualised how the diseased parts there were understood as ‘morbid anatomy’, later publishing The Morbid Anatomy of some of the most important parts of the human body (1793), which was one of the most successful works of learned medicine published in the eighteenth century. In this paper I argue that Baillie’s practice of morbid anatomy was fundamentally in keeping with the anatomical practices of the Great Windmill Street school; the tactile and visual information provided by the cadaver was prioritised above all else, but now for the subject of disease. This challenged typical practice in the study of disease, which included post-mortem examination of cadavers as part of case histories. In removing the temporal aspect from the study of diseased cadavers, Baillie argued that diseased appearances could be generalised, not just singular, knowledge and therefore an anatomical subject in its own right.