Dr Neil Tarrant

Neil is a specialist in the intellectual and cultural history of sixteenth-century Italy, with a particular focus on the history of science and medicine.  He studied in the History Department of the University of Edinburgh, the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at Imperial College London and the Centre for Intellectual History at the University of Sussex.  He has subsequently worked in the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at Imperial College, the History Department at Royal Holloway University of London, Science, Technology and Innovation Studies at the University of Edinburgh, the History Department at the University of York and the School of History at the University of Leeds.

Major publications

• (With Lorenza Gianfrancesco) The Science of Naples: Making Knowledge in Italy’s Pre-eminent City (London: UCL Press, 2024)
• Defining Nature’s Limits: The Roman Inquisition and the Boundaries of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022)
• (with Andrew Campbell and Lorenza Gianfrancesco), ‘Alchemy and the Mendicant Orders of Medieval and Early Modern Europe’. Special issue Ambix 65 (2018): 201-301. 
• ‘Saving Sanctity: The Roman Inquisition and the Initial Prosecution of Girolamo Cardano’, Religions 15 (2024): 1-17. 
• ‘Reconstructing Thomist Astrology: Robert Bellarmine and the Papal Bull Coeli et terrae’, Annals of Science 77 (2020): 26-49. 
• ‘Science, Religion and Italy’s Seventeenth-Century Decline: From Francesco De Sanctis to Benedetto Croce’, Zygon 54 (2019): 1125-44.
• ‘The Ambiguities of Censorship in post-Tridentine Italy: The Case of Physiognomy’, Preternature 8 (2019): 171-201. 
• ‘Between Aquinas and Eymerich: The Roman Inquisition’s Use of Dominican Thought in the Censorship of Alchemy’, Ambix 65 (2018): 210-31. 
• ‘Concord and Toleration in the Thought of Francesco Pucci, 1578-81’, The Sixteenth Century Journal 46 (2015): 983-1003. 
• ‘Censoring Science in Sixteenth-Century Italy: Recent (and not-so-recent) Research’, History of Science 52 (2014): 1-27. 
• ‘Giambattista Della Porta and the Roman Inquisition: Censorship and the Definition of Nature’s Limits in Sixteenth-Century Italy’, British Journal for the History of Science 46 (2013): 601-25.

Teaching

• HIST0182: Early Modern Europe
• HIST0089: Gender, Sex and Bodies in Early Modern England
• HIST0710: Gender and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

For more information, visit Neil's RPS profile.