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Elaine Leong

Visiting Scholar (Mar 2019-Jun 2024)

PhD, Dept. of History University College London

I gained my doctorate in Modern History from the University of Oxford in 2006. Before joining the MPIWG, I was a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge and a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick. In 2006 and 2007, I held short-term fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Huntington Library. My article "Making Medicines in the Early Modern Household," (Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2008) was awarded the 2009 J. Worth Estes Prize by the American Association for the History of Medicine and the 2010 Jerry Stannard Award.

My research is centered upon medical and scientific knowledge transfer and production. My interdisciplinary projects use theories and methods in the history of the book and the history of reading to elucidate practical knowledge and quotidian activities within the domestic sphere. My first book Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England (University of Chicago Press, 2018) examined knowledge practices in early modern English Households. My current book project Reading Rivière in Early Modern England, uses the story of Lazare Rivière’s bestselling Praxis medica/The Practice of Physick to explore the production, transfer and codification of vernacular medical knowledge in early modern Europe. I am also interested in investigating women’s medical knowledge and practice and how this knowledge was generated, acquired and transmitted. Finally, I have particular interests in note-taking, paper technologies, and household archives of natural knowledge. With Alisha Rankin (Tufts University), I edited Secrets and Knowledge: Medicine, Science and Commerce 1500–1800 (Ashgate Publishing, 2011) and "Testing Drugs and Trying Cures," Special Issue of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine  (2017). I am also co-editor, with Christine von Oertzen and Carla Bittel, of Working with Paper: Gendered Practices in the History of Knowledge (forthcoming, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). 

Current Projects

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Completed Projects

Collecting Knowledge for the Family
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Early Modern Recipes Online Collective
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Gender Studies of Science
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Learning by the Book
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Paper Cures in the Early Modern Household
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Reading Early Medicine
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Reading Rivière
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Recipes and Everyday Knowledge
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Testing Drugs and Trying Cures in Premodern Europe
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The Recipes Project
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Translating Medicine in the Premodern World
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Working with Paper
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Selected Publications

Leong, Elaine (2023). “Recipes and Paper Knowledge.” In Practices of Ephemera in Early Modern England, ed. C. Davies, H. Lilley, and C. Richardson, 105–110. New York, NY: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003058588-9.

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Leong, Elaine (2022). “When the Tallamys Met John French: Translating, Printing, and Reading ‘The Art of Distillation.’” Osiris 37: 89–112. https://doi.org/10.1086/719222.

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Alberts, Tara, Sietske Fransen, and Elaine Leong (2022). “Translating Medicine, ca. 800–1900: Articulations and Disarticulations.” Osiris 37: 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1086/719045.

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Creager, Angela N. H., Mathias Grote, and Elaine Leong (2021). “Learning by the Book: Manuals and Handbooks in the History of Science.” History of Knowledge: Research, Resources, and Perspectives (blog), March 1, 2021. https://historyofknowledge…

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Leong, Elaine (2008). “Making Medicines in the Early Modern Household.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82 (1): 145–168.

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Leong, Elaine and Sara Pennell (2007). “Recipe Collections and the Currency of Medical Knowledge in the Early Modern ‘Medical Marketplace.’” In Medicine and the Market in England and Its Colonies, c. 1450- c. 1850., ed. M. S. R. Jenner, 133–152. Basingstoke [u.a.]: Palgrave Macmillan.

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