Eleanor Webb

Eleanor Webb

Ph.D. Candidate

Odlozilik Graduate Fellow
Graduate Fellow in Global Medieval and Renaissance Studies

My research focuses on intellectual communities in early modern Italy. I am currently working on a dissertation, tentatively entitled: “Between Studium and Accademia: The Spaces and Languages of Learning in Early Modern Italy.” I investigate how university professors, students, local professionals and authors used learned academies to experiment with new ideas, research methods, and modes of expression that crossed disciplinary boundaries. This project, and my research more generally, focuses on the history of scientific thought, academic freedoms, and the linguistic and literary cultures of education.

My research is supported by a Venetian Research Grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, Dissertation Research Awards from the Folger Institute, UPenn's Center for Italian Studies and the Haldane Fund, and a short-term fellowship at the Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas, Austin). 

At Penn, I have organized the Global Medieval and Renaissance Studies Colloquium (AYs 21/22, 22/23, 23/4) and co-organized the History Department's Graduate Colloquium. In AY 22-23 I was Curatorial Assistant at the Kislak Center for Rare Books and Manuscripts. I currently act as Graduate Fellow for Global Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and Assistant Editor for Bibliotheca Dantesca, an international peer-reviewed journal dedicated to Dante studies. 

Before Penn, I earned a Bachelors degree (with honors) in History from the University of Warwick, for which I achieved the Best Overall Performance Award (2016-17). I published my undergraduate thesis in Comitatus. I then completed a Masters degree in Cultures of the European Renaissance from the University of Warwick’s Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, and was awarded the Martin Lowry Prize for Highest Overall Achievement

Committee: Ann Moyer (advisor), Eva Del Soldato, Ada Kuskowski, David Lines 

Education

M.A. Culture of the European Renaissance, University of Warwick Centre for the Study of the Renaissance (2018)

B.A.(Hons) History, University of Warwick (2017)

Research Interests

Education; intellectual history; intellectual communities; history of science and medicine; Reformation history; vernacular; print

Courses Taught

HIST 1201: Foundations of Law

HIST 143: Foundations of European Thought

HIST 001: Making the Modern World 

HIST 001: History of Policing 

 

Selected Publications

Platonic Love and Aristotelian Ethics in Alessandro Piccolomini’s Institutione (1542)’ in Harmony and Contrast: Plato and Aristotle in the Early Modern Period, ed. Anna Corrias and Eva Del Soldato (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).

[Book review] "'Building the Canon Through the Classics: Imitation and Variation in Renaissance Italy (1350-1580).' Eloisa Morra, ed. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2019.," Bibliotheca Dantesca: Journal of Dante Studies: Vol. 4 , Article 22. 

Femmina masculo e masculo femmina: Androgynous Beauty and Ambiguous Sexualities in the Italian Renaissance’, Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 49 (2018), pp. 103-35. 

Affiliations

Renaissance Society of America