Melissa Reynolds

2025-26 Short-term Fellow

Providential Bodies: Health and Environment in Early Modern English Medicine

My book project, tentatively titled Providential Bodies: Health and Environment in Early Modern English Medicine, investigates the long history of ‘reading’ English bodies in relationship to their environment, exploring how this practice was transformed in confessionalized, post-Reformation England, and how these transformations influenced the emergence of a localized, rather than universal, theory of environmental medicine.

This study, now in its early research stages, has the potential to draw together several important but, until now, disconnected strains of research within early modern English history: on the effects of the Reformation on theories of bodily difference; on the co-emergence of providentialism and ethnonationalism within post-Reformation English society; on enclosure, land rights, and the health effects of migration into cities; on colonial agricultural ventures, which theorized English bodies’ susceptibility to varying climates; and on the birth of demography and medical experimentation in the context of the Royal Society. The emergence of a notion that the body’s relationship to its environment was particular and indicative of individual differences in health, I suggest, dramatically altered the trajectory of early modern English medicine.

From that singular insight came a host of developments that Providential Bodies seeks to contextualize as part of a broader pattern of thought and belief, one that stretches from the diagnostic practices of later medieval physicians to the medical experiments of the Royal Society, traversing the medieval-early modern divide that too often bifurcates histories of English medicine and science.