Claire Litt // In early modern Italy, there was enormous pressure on noblewomen to produce healthy male children. The security of ruling families’ lines of succession (and the political stability of the city-states they ruled) were often precariously dependant on the reproductive health of only one or two women who married into each family. For…
Author: Claire Seville Litt
Claire Litt obtained a Ph.D. in History from Queen's University in 2022. Her research interests include early modern Florence and the Medici, the history of medicine, women's health care, and gemmology.
The Great Millennial Depression?
Claire Litt// The post-World War II babies of the 1950s were the teenagers and young adults who brought about the cultural and sexual revolutions of the 1960s. Theirs was a generation of optimism and change; they fainted during Beatles concerts, demanded contraception and held feminist protests. Restrained only by the hemline…
“Beauty is health; health beauty”: Humoural Beauty in Early Modern Europe
Claire Litt // In May 1819 Keats wrote Ode on a Grecian Urn, a poem that culminates in the urn’s triumphant declaration that its form, which was perfect and unchanging, had bestowed upon it eternal ascendency. “Beauty is truth; truth beauty” says the Grecian Urn, “That is all ye need to know on earth, and…
Bizarre Plots to Bezoars Stones: Poisons and Antidotes in Medici Florence
Claire Litt // On February 8th, 1548 a ciphered letter addressed to Duke Cosimo I reported that “The Farnesi every day try new practices to kill Don Ferrando [Gonzaga] with poison” (Medici Archive Project Doc ID# 5407). By the mid-16th century in Italy, the brazen daylight attacks that characterized assassinations of political leaders in previous…
Animate Skeletons and Living Death: The Art of Vesalius’s Anatomical Science
Claire Litt // Medical sciences study the corporeal aspect of human existence. Since our species’s emergence as anatomically modern humans in the Middle Paleolithic era, we have shared an experiential knowledge of what it feels like to have the body of a Homo sapien as the sensual medium between the physical world and our inner lives….
Demons, Diseases, and Definitions: Historicizing Mental Illness and Neurological Disorders
Claire Litt // “I brought You my son, who has a mute spirit. And whenever it seizes him, it throws him down; he foams at the mouth, gnashes his teeth, and becomes rigid.” (Mark 9:17-16:20, NKJV) Following the publication of the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual…
Blood, Stone, Snake, Woman: A Brief History of Association
Claire Litt // Medusa was once renowned for her loveliness, and roused jealous hopes in the hearts of many suitors. Of all the beauties she possessed, none was more striking than her lovely hair. […] But, so they say, the lord of the sea robbed her of her virginity in the temple of Minerva. Jove’s…