Dr. Melissa Reynolds is a cultural historian of medieval and early modern Europe with broad research interests in the history of medicine and science, the history of gender and the body, and the history of material texts. In her research and teaching, she is particularly interested in tracing how elite or learned cultures of medical and scientific knowledge are conveyed to ‘ordinary’ people through non-elite media, and in turn, how access to this knowledge brought about cultural change. She is Assistant Professor of early modern European history at Texas Christian University. Previously, she was a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the Wolf Humanities Center and a Lecturer in History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Perkins-Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts and a Lecturer in History at Princeton University. She received her Ph.D. in History from Rutgers University, and a BA and MA from the University of Alabama.

Reynolds’s first book, Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print (Chicago, 2024), shows how ordinary English readers grew to be selective and discerning consumers of knowledge in everyday interactions with inexpensive, utilitarian books like medical recipe collections, almanacs, and agricultural manuals. Though these books rarely contained revolutionary scientific or medical knowledge, their increasing availability and importance within English lives had revolutionary consequences. By tracing the proliferation of these “practical books”—first, in manuscript, and later, in print— Reynolds reconstructs shifting attitudes toward medicine and science over two centuries of seismic change within English culture, attending especially to the effects of the printing press and the Reformation on attitudes toward nature and the human body.

Reynolds has published articles and essays in the Journal of British Studies, Social History of Medicine, Gender & History, and Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences. She has also written about a little known early modern epidemic and about lessons to be learned from pre-modern reproductive medicine in the Washington Post. She is a longtime contributor to and editorial team member of The Recipes Project, a quarterly online publication devoted to recipe studies of all kinds, where she has written on perpetual prognostications, reproductive medical recipes, and playful magic in medieval recipe books. Her publications have been recognized by the American Association for the History of Medicine and the Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography. Her research has been supported with the fellowships and grants from the Renaissance Society of America, Princeton’s University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Richard III Society and the Medieval Academy of America, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Rare Books School at the University of Virginia.

Contact

Email: m.reynolds1(at)tcu.edu
Twitter: @melkatrey
Threads: @melkatrey
GitHub: melissabreynolds