Andrew Rankin
Biographic Data
| ID | 310251 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Andrew Rankin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Andrew |
| FAMILY NAME | Rankin |
| SIGNATURE | RANKIN A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Tufts University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2128-8686 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 9 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Gender History
Seven specialists in Central and East Central European history have come together to discuss the state of the field of gender studies in their subfields. Much emphasis is placed on thinking about how the current political situation in the 2020s is affecting what historians do, what is taught in the classroom, and how it relates to the larger political environment. This forum is based on the 2026 American Historical Association (AHA) Central Europ…
The Great Elector’s Table
A Centaur in London
Sharon T. Strocchia. Forgotten Healers
Women’s active role in diverse areas of premodern medical practice has been well established over the last decades. As far back as 1989, Monica Green challenged the notion that “women’s health was women’s business” and provided strong evidence that men and women treated both men and women in a variety of ways. More recent studies of recipes, domestic healing, and early modern patients demonstrated the central importance of the household as a site…
Learned Physicians and Everyday Medical Practice in the Renaissance
Institutional Reckonings in the History of Medicine
Institutional Reckonings in the History of Medicine Jeremy Greene, Alisha Rankin, and Gabriela Soto Laveaga This issue of the Bulletin includes three independently proposed articles that converge on the topic of institutional racism—and student activism against it—in the context of academic medicine in the United States. Two of the essays focus on the recent role of student activists in decrying the racist and eugenicist ideologies of vaunted phy…
Abortion in Early Modern Italy
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
New World Drugs and the Archive of Practice
This essay examines European vernacular translations of the Spanish physician Nicolás Monardes’s treatises on drugs from the New World. I use the concept of an “archive of practice,” a set of original sources based in practices rather than texts, to examine how translators articulated or disarticulated indigenous Amerindian knowledge in Italian, English, French, Dutch, and German sources. Examining practice as a kind of archive allows us to consi…
Von der Allegorie zur Empirie
Von der Allegorie zur Empirie: Natur im Rechtsdenken des Spätmittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit. Susanne Lepsius, Friedrich Vollhardt, and Oliver Bach, eds. Abhandlungen zur rechtswissenschaftlichen Grundlagenforschung; Münchener Universitätsschriften: Juristische Fakultät 100. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2017. vi + 328 pp. £79.95. - Volume 74 Issue 1
Testing Drugs and Trying Cures
This article examines traditions of testing drugs (as substances) and trying cures (on patients) in medieval and early modern Europe. It argues that the history of drug testing needs to be a more central story to overall histories of scientific experiment. The practice of conducting thoughtful-and sometimes contrived-tests on drugs has a rich and varied tradition dating back to antiquity, which expanded in the Middle Ages and early modern period.…
On Anecdote and Antidotes
This article describes the use of poison trials, in which an animal or a condemned criminal was poisoned, to test antidotes in sixteenth-century Europe. In contrast to most drug testing in medieval and early modern Europe, which was gathered in the normal course of therapeutic experience, the poison trial was a contrived, deliberate event. I argue that poison trials had an important function in both medical testing and medical writing in the peri…
Ulinka Rublack. The Astronomer and the Witch
Johannes Kepler has always been among the most enigmatic of the early modern astronomers. Famous today for his laws of planetary motion and his defense of the Copernican system, he also infused his astronomy with a religious mysticism and believed fervently in God’s celestial design and his own ability to read it. Ulinka Rublack’s The Astronomer and the Witch: Johannes Kepler’s Fight for His Mother adds a superb new view of the full complexity of…
Simone Laqua-O’Donnell. Women and the Counter-Reformation in Early Modern Münster
The impact of the Catholic Reformation on women in early modern Europe has been a focus of much excellent scholarship over the last decade. Scholars including Mary Laven, Silvia Evangelisti, Sandra Cavallo, Barbara Diefendorf, and Ulrike Strasser have shown the effects of the Tridentine reforms on women in Italy, France, and southern Germany. In Women and the Counter-Reformation in Early Modern Münster, Simone Laqua-O’Donnell adds a detailed stud…
Exotic materials and treasured knowledge
Estate inventories taken after the death of sixteenth‐ and seventeenth‐ century G erman noblewomen occasionally contain itemizations of court apothecaries. These accounts not only portray the pharmacy as squarely under the guidance of the women in question, they also give us a sense of what specific materia medica noblewomen used in their practice. At the same time, this essay argues, inventories are inherently flawed historical documents, becaus…
Arznei und Confect
Gabriele Wacker. Arznei und Confect: Medikale Kultur am Wolfenbütteler Hof im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert. Wolfenbütteler Forschungen 134. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2013. 608 pp. €98. ISBN: 978-3-447-06801-7. - Volume 67 Issue 4
Panaceia's Daughters
"Panaceia's Daughters provides the first book-length study of noblewomen's healing activities in early modern Europe. Drawing on rich archival sources, Alisha Rankin demonstrates that numerous German noblewomen were deeply involved in making medicines and recommending them to patients, and many gained widespread fame for their remedies. Turning a common historical argument on its head, Rankin maintains that noblewomen's pharmacy came to prominenc…
Recent Trends in Organized Crime in Japan
The popular status of outlaws logically relates to the integrity of the legal system outside which they operate. Putting it simply, for villains to look bad, the police need to look good. Tamura Eitarō has shown how the chivalrous image enjoyed by nineteenth-century yakuza stemmed in part from public disgust for corruption and violence by the police squads who hunted them. A similar problem confronts the NPA today. Since the early 2000s police co…
St-Century Yakuza
Japan has had a love-hate relationship with its outlaws. Medieval seafaring bands freelanced as mercenaries for the warlords or provided security for trading vessels; when not needed they were hunted as pirates. Horse-thieves and mounted raiders sold their skills to military households in return for a degree of tolerance toward their banditry. In the 1600s urban street gangs policed their own neighborhoods while fighting with samurai in the servi…
Gender and Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Culture
Kathleen P. Long, ed. Gender and Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Culture. Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2010. xvi + 314 pp. index. illus. tbls. bibl. $99.95. ISBN: 978–0–7546–6971–5. - Volume 64 Issue 3
Ketzer, Künstler und Dämonen
Bernd Roeck. Ketzer, Künstler und Dämonen: Die Welten des Goldschmieds David Altenstetter. Eine Geschichte aus der Renaissance. Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2010. 288 pp. + 16 color pls. index. illus. €24.90. ISBN: 978–3–406–59171–6. - Volume 64 Issue 1
Der Dienst Am Kranken
Reviewed by: Der Dienst Am Kranken: Krankenversorgung zwischen Caritas, Medizin und Okonomie vom Mittelalter bis zur Neuzeit Alisha Rankin Gerhard Aumüller, Kornelia Grundmann, and Christina Vanja, eds. Der Dienst Am Kranken: Krankenversorgung zwischen Caritas, Medizin und Okonomie vom Mittelalter bis zur Neuzeit. Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission für Hessen 68. Marburg: N. G. Elwert Verlag, 2007. xv + 383 Ill. €24.00 (978-3-7708-131…
Empirics, Physicians, and Wonder Drugs in Early Modern Germany
This essay examines the conflicting approaches towards marvelous cures in sixteenth-century Germany As pharmaceutical substances flooded in from both east and west, they brought with them a market for "wonder drugs" that would cure any ailment. In this climate, university-trained physicians felt threatened by the rising popularity of cures hawked by empirical practitioners, while at the same time endorsing certain wonder drugs. Using the example …
Duchess, Heal Thyself
This article uses the case of German noblewoman Elisabeth of Rochlitz as a window on sixteenth-century patient attitudes toward disease and the body. A widowed duchess of Saxony, Elisabeth spent the last twenty years of her life battling an increasingly serious string of illnesses. Despite her ready access to learned physicians and her friendly relationship with several of them, she used a wide variety of practitioners and frequently privileged l…
Distilling Knowledge
394 Book Reviews / Early Science and Medicine 13 (2008) 384415 Bruce T. Moran, Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 210, $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 0674 01495 2. Distilling Knowledge provides a much-needed survey of the relationship between alchemy and the development of natural knowledge in early modern Europe. The role of alchemy and alchemists in p…
Becoming an Expert Practitioner
This essay proposes that the well-documented interest in empirical and experimental practice at the early modern German courts was not limited to male practitioners. Just as princes evinced an interest in practical alchemy, mathematics, and astronomy, a large number of gentlewomen became expert medical practitioners. Using a case study of one noblewoman, Electress Anna of Saxony, I would like to expand the notion of "prince-practitioning" to a mo…
Becoming an Expert Practitioner
This essay proposes that the well-documented interest in empirical and experimental practice at the early modern German courts was not limited to male practitioners. Just as princes evinced an interest in practical alchemy, mathematics, and astronomy, a large number of gentlewomen became expert medical practitioners. Using a case study of one noblewoman, Electress Anna of Saxony, I would like to expand the notion of "prince-practitioning" to a mo…
New World Drugs and the Archive of Practice
This essay examines European vernacular translations of the Spanish physician Nicolás Monardes’s treatises on drugs from the New World. I use the concept of an “archive of practice,” a set of original sources based in practices rather than texts, to examine how translators articulated or disarticulated indigenous Amerindian knowledge in Italian, English, French, Dutch, and German sources. Examining practice as a kind of archive allows us to consi…
St-Century Yakuza
Japan has had a love-hate relationship with its outlaws. Medieval seafaring bands freelanced as mercenaries for the warlords or provided security for trading vessels; when not needed they were hunted as pirates. Horse-thieves and mounted raiders sold their skills to military households in return for a degree of tolerance toward their banditry. In the 1600s urban street gangs policed their own neighborhoods while fighting with samurai in the servi…
Perfecting Aristotle
European Expansion and Self-Definition
From the beginning of European expansion, natural knowledge was both its precondition and its constantly developing product. Over the course of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese voyages of exploration in the western and southern Atlantic and along the coast of Africa promoted the development of new knowledge regarding marine navigation and orientation, as well as the ability to rule the seas. They led to new experiences as new seas were saile…
Becoming an Expert Practitioner
This essay proposes that the well-documented interest in empirical and experimental practice at the early modern German courts was not limited to male practitioners. Just as princes evinced an interest in practical alchemy, mathematics, and astronomy, a large number of gentlewomen became expert medical practitioners. Using a case study of one noblewoman, Electress Anna of Saxony, I would like to expand the notion of "prince-practitioning" to a mo…
Duchess, Heal Thyself
This article uses the case of German noblewoman Elisabeth of Rochlitz as a window on sixteenth-century patient attitudes toward disease and the body. A widowed duchess of Saxony, Elisabeth spent the last twenty years of her life battling an increasingly serious string of illnesses. Despite her ready access to learned physicians and her friendly relationship with several of them, she used a wide variety of practitioners and frequently privileged l…
Distilling Knowledge
394 Book Reviews / Early Science and Medicine 13 (2008) 384415 Bruce T. Moran, Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 210, $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 0674 01495 2. Distilling Knowledge provides a much-needed survey of the relationship between alchemy and the development of natural knowledge in early modern Europe. The role of alchemy and alchemists in p…
Der Dienst Am Kranken
Reviewed by: Der Dienst Am Kranken: Krankenversorgung zwischen Caritas, Medizin und Okonomie vom Mittelalter bis zur Neuzeit Alisha Rankin Gerhard Aumüller, Kornelia Grundmann, and Christina Vanja, eds. Der Dienst Am Kranken: Krankenversorgung zwischen Caritas, Medizin und Okonomie vom Mittelalter bis zur Neuzeit. Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission für Hessen 68. Marburg: N. G. Elwert Verlag, 2007. xv + 383 Ill. €24.00 (978-3-7708-131…
Empirics, Physicians, and Wonder Drugs in Early Modern Germany
This essay examines the conflicting approaches towards marvelous cures in sixteenth-century Germany As pharmaceutical substances flooded in from both east and west, they brought with them a market for "wonder drugs" that would cure any ailment. In this climate, university-trained physicians felt threatened by the rising popularity of cures hawked by empirical practitioners, while at the same time endorsing certain wonder drugs. Using the example …
Gender and Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Culture
Kathleen P. Long, ed. Gender and Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Culture. Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2010. xvi + 314 pp. index. illus. tbls. bibl. $99.95. ISBN: 978–0–7546–6971–5. - Volume 64 Issue 3
Ketzer, Künstler und Dämonen
Bernd Roeck. Ketzer, Künstler und Dämonen: Die Welten des Goldschmieds David Altenstetter. Eine Geschichte aus der Renaissance. Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2010. 288 pp. + 16 color pls. index. illus. €24.90. ISBN: 978–3–406–59171–6. - Volume 64 Issue 1
Recent Trends in Organized Crime in Japan
The popular status of outlaws logically relates to the integrity of the legal system outside which they operate. Putting it simply, for villains to look bad, the police need to look good. Tamura Eitarō has shown how the chivalrous image enjoyed by nineteenth-century yakuza stemmed in part from public disgust for corruption and violence by the police squads who hunted them. A similar problem confronts the NPA today. Since the early 2000s police co…
St-Century Yakuza
Japan has had a love-hate relationship with its outlaws. Medieval seafaring bands freelanced as mercenaries for the warlords or provided security for trading vessels; when not needed they were hunted as pirates. Horse-thieves and mounted raiders sold their skills to military households in return for a degree of tolerance toward their banditry. In the 1600s urban street gangs policed their own neighborhoods while fighting with samurai in the servi…
Panaceia's Daughters
"Panaceia's Daughters provides the first book-length study of noblewomen's healing activities in early modern Europe. Drawing on rich archival sources, Alisha Rankin demonstrates that numerous German noblewomen were deeply involved in making medicines and recommending them to patients, and many gained widespread fame for their remedies. Turning a common historical argument on its head, Rankin maintains that noblewomen's pharmacy came to prominenc…
Exotic materials and treasured knowledge
Estate inventories taken after the death of sixteenth‐ and seventeenth‐ century G erman noblewomen occasionally contain itemizations of court apothecaries. These accounts not only portray the pharmacy as squarely under the guidance of the women in question, they also give us a sense of what specific materia medica noblewomen used in their practice. At the same time, this essay argues, inventories are inherently flawed historical documents, becaus…
Arznei und Confect
Gabriele Wacker. Arznei und Confect: Medikale Kultur am Wolfenbütteler Hof im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert. Wolfenbütteler Forschungen 134. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2013. 608 pp. €98. ISBN: 978-3-447-06801-7. - Volume 67 Issue 4
Simone Laqua-O’Donnell. Women and the Counter-Reformation in Early Modern Münster
The impact of the Catholic Reformation on women in early modern Europe has been a focus of much excellent scholarship over the last decade. Scholars including Mary Laven, Silvia Evangelisti, Sandra Cavallo, Barbara Diefendorf, and Ulrike Strasser have shown the effects of the Tridentine reforms on women in Italy, France, and southern Germany. In Women and the Counter-Reformation in Early Modern Münster, Simone Laqua-O’Donnell adds a detailed stud…
Testing Drugs and Trying Cures
This article examines traditions of testing drugs (as substances) and trying cures (on patients) in medieval and early modern Europe. It argues that the history of drug testing needs to be a more central story to overall histories of scientific experiment. The practice of conducting thoughtful-and sometimes contrived-tests on drugs has a rich and varied tradition dating back to antiquity, which expanded in the Middle Ages and early modern period.…
On Anecdote and Antidotes
This article describes the use of poison trials, in which an animal or a condemned criminal was poisoned, to test antidotes in sixteenth-century Europe. In contrast to most drug testing in medieval and early modern Europe, which was gathered in the normal course of therapeutic experience, the poison trial was a contrived, deliberate event. I argue that poison trials had an important function in both medical testing and medical writing in the peri…
Ulinka Rublack. The Astronomer and the Witch
Johannes Kepler has always been among the most enigmatic of the early modern astronomers. Famous today for his laws of planetary motion and his defense of the Copernican system, he also infused his astronomy with a religious mysticism and believed fervently in God’s celestial design and his own ability to read it. Ulinka Rublack’s The Astronomer and the Witch: Johannes Kepler’s Fight for His Mother adds a superb new view of the full complexity of…
Von der Allegorie zur Empirie
Von der Allegorie zur Empirie: Natur im Rechtsdenken des Spätmittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit. Susanne Lepsius, Friedrich Vollhardt, and Oliver Bach, eds. Abhandlungen zur rechtswissenschaftlichen Grundlagenforschung; Münchener Universitätsschriften: Juristische Fakultät 100. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2017. vi + 328 pp. £79.95. - Volume 74 Issue 1
Institutional Reckonings in the History of Medicine
Institutional Reckonings in the History of Medicine Jeremy Greene, Alisha Rankin, and Gabriela Soto Laveaga This issue of the Bulletin includes three independently proposed articles that converge on the topic of institutional racism—and student activism against it—in the context of academic medicine in the United States. Two of the essays focus on the recent role of student activists in decrying the racist and eugenicist ideologies of vaunted phy…
Abortion in Early Modern Italy
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
New World Drugs and the Archive of Practice
This essay examines European vernacular translations of the Spanish physician Nicolás Monardes’s treatises on drugs from the New World. I use the concept of an “archive of practice,” a set of original sources based in practices rather than texts, to examine how translators articulated or disarticulated indigenous Amerindian knowledge in Italian, English, French, Dutch, and German sources. Examining practice as a kind of archive allows us to consi…
Sharon T. Strocchia. Forgotten Healers
Women’s active role in diverse areas of premodern medical practice has been well established over the last decades. As far back as 1989, Monica Green challenged the notion that “women’s health was women’s business” and provided strong evidence that men and women treated both men and women in a variety of ways. More recent studies of recipes, domestic healing, and early modern patients demonstrated the central importance of the household as a site…
Learned Physicians and Everyday Medical Practice in the Renaissance
A Centaur in London
History (16 works) · Art (12 works) · Classics (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · History (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Medicine (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works)