A path-breaking work at last available in paper, History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning is Nancy G. Siraisi’s examination of the intersections of medically trained authors and history from 1450 to 1650. Rather than studying medicine and history as separate traditions, Siraisi calls attention to their mutual interaction in the rapidly changing world of Renaissance erudition. With remarkably detailed scholarship, Siraisi investigates doctors’ efforts to explore the legacies handed down to them from ancient medical and anatomical writings.

Western Europe supported a highly developed and diverse medical community in the late medieval and early Renaissance periods. In her absorbing history of this complex era in medicine, Siraisi explores the inner workings of the medical community and illustrates the connections of medicine to both natural philosophy and technical skills.

Michael Stolberg offers the first comprehensive presentation of medical training and day-to-day medical practice during the Renaissance. Drawing on previously unknown manuscript sources, he describes the prevailing notions of illness in the era, diagnostic and therapeutic procedures, the doctor–patient relationship, and home and lay medicine.

During the Renaissance, collections of letters both satisfied humanist enthusiasm for ancient literary forms and provided the flexibility of a format appropriate to many types of inquiry. The printed collections of medical letters by Giovanni Manardo of Ferrara and other physicians in early sixteenth-century Europe may thus be regarded as products of medical humanism. The letters of mid- and late sixteenth-century Italian and German physicians examined in Communities of Learned Experience by Nancy G. Siraisi also illustrate practices associated with the concepts of the Republic of Letters: open and relatively informal communication among a learned community and a liberal exchange of information and ideas. Additionally, such published medical correspondence may often have served to provide mutual reinforcement of professional reputation. Siraisi uses some of these collections to compare approaches to sharing medical knowledge across broad regions of Europe and within a city, with the goal of illuminating geographic differences as well as diversity within social, urban, courtly, and academic environments. The collections she has selected include essays on general medical topics addressed to colleagues or disciples, some advice for individual patients (usually written at the request of the patient’s doctor), and a strong dose of controversy. -- Cynthia Klestinec, Miami University' Ohio

The Canon of Avicenna, one of the principal texts of Arabic origin to be assimilated into the medical learning of medieval Europe, retained importance in Renaissance and early modern European medicine. After surveying the medieval reception of the book, Nancy Siraisi focuses on the Canon in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Italy, and especially on its role in the university teaching of philosophy of medicine and physiological theory. Originally published in 1987. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This book invites readers to consider the possibilities for learning and growth when artists and arts educators come into a classroom and work with teachers to engage students in drama, dance, visual art, music, and media arts. It is a nuts-and-bolts guide to arts integration, across the curriculum in grades K-12, describing how students, teachers, and artists get started with arts integration, work through classroom curriculum involving the arts, and go beyond the typical "unit" to engage in the arts throughout the school year. The framework is based on six years of arts integration in the Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE). Renaissance in the Classroom: *fully explains the planning, implementation, and assessment processes in arts integration; *frames arts integration in the larger context of curriculum integration, problem-based learning, and the multiple intelligences; *provides the theoretical frameworks that connect standards-based instruction to innovative teaching and learning, and embeds arts education in the larger issue of whole school improvement; *blends a description of the arts integration process with personal stories, anecdotes, and impressions of those involved, with a wealth of examples from diverse cultural backgrounds; *tells the stories of arts integration from the classroom to the school level and introduces the dynamics of arts partnerships in communities that connect arts organizations, schools, and neighborhoods; *offers a variety of resources for engaging the arts--either as an individual teacher or within a partnership; and *includes a color insert that illustrates the work teachers, students, and artists have done in arts integration schools and an extensive appendix of tools, instruments, Web site, contacts, and curriculum ideas for immediate use. Of primary interest to K-12 classroom teachers, arts specialists, and visiting artists who work with young people in schools or community arts organizations, this book is also highly relevant and useful for policymakers, arts partnerships, administrators, and parents.

We usually see the Renaissance as a marked departure from older traditions, but Renaissance scholars often continued to cling to the teachings of the past. For instance, despite the evidence of their own dissections, which contradicted ancient and medieval texts, Renaissance anatomists continued to teach those outdated views for nearly two centuries. In Books of the Body, Andrea Carlino explores the nature and causes of this intellectual inertia. On the one hand, anatomical practice was constrained by a reverence for classical texts and the belief that the study of anatomy was more properly part of natural philosophy than of medicine. On the other hand, cultural resistance to dissection and dismemberment of the human body, as well as moral and social norms that governed access to cadavers and the ritual of their public display in the anatomy theater, also delayed anatomy's development. A fascinating history of both Renaissance anatomists and the bodies they dissected, this book will interest anyone studying Renaissance science, medicine, art, religion, and society.

How much did the Renaissance change medical history and public health? Did landmark developments benefit the everyday lives of ordinary people? This book looks at the new 'scientific' ways of learning and experimentation of the period, to show what health and disease were like in the Old and New Worlds.

Carlsmith's A Renaissance Education uses a case study approach to examine educational practices in the north-eastern Italian city of Bergamo from 1500 to 1650.

Winner of the Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize A new history uncovers the crucial role women played in the great transformations of medical science and health care that accompanied the Italian Renaissance. In Renaissance Italy women played a more central role in providing health care than historians have thus far acknowledged. Women from all walks of life—from household caregivers and nurses to nuns working as apothecaries—drove the Italian medical economy. In convent pharmacies, pox hospitals, girls’ shelters, and homes, women were practitioners and purveyors of knowledge about health and healing, making significant contributions to early modern medicine. Sharon Strocchia offers a wealth of new evidence about how illness was diagnosed and treated, whether by noblewomen living at court or poor nurses living in hospitals. She finds that women expanded on their roles as health care providers by participating in empirical work and the development of scientific knowledge. Nuns, in particular, were among the most prominent manufacturers and vendors of pharmaceutical products. Their experiments with materials and techniques added greatly to the era’s understanding of medical care. Thanks to their excellence in medicine urban Italian women had greater access to commerce than perhaps any other women in Europe. Forgotten Healers provides a more accurate picture of the pursuit of health in Renaissance Italy. More broadly, by emphasizing that the frontlines of medical care are often found in the household and other spaces thought of as female, Strocchia encourages us to rethink the history of medicine.