Congratulations, Nancy Siraisi

By Kathy G.

This morning, I was surprised and delighted to learn that historian Nancy Siraisi was among the winners of this year's round of MacArthur "genius grants." The MacArthur is an extremely prestigious fellowship given to academics, writers, artists, scientists, activists, and other creative types. What's unique about it is that it is very generous (it pays $100,000 a year for five years) and that there are basically no strings attached -- the winners can use the money any way they please. 

The reason I was so pleased to see Siraisi's name among the winners is that she's a former professor of mine. The first time I walked into a college classroom at Hunter College was for her course on early modern Europe. It was one of those introductory survey courses that attempt to cover an impossibly broad terrain -- in this case, the history of all of Europe between the 1400's and the 1700's.

The subject of the course appealed to me, because, frankly, I find European history to be infinitely more interesting than American history. Don't get me wrong -- there's plenty of exciting stuff in American history, and I've long had a strong interest in U.S. women's history, labor history, and African-American history. But the history of Europe is, to me, much more fascinating. I think this is because it covers a much longer time period, and therefore, much of it seems whole lot stranger to me than American history does (which is not to say that there isn't plenty of weirdness in American history).

I mean, the Founding Fathers, of course, believed many things that are dramatically and profoundly different from what most 21st century Americans believe today, but at least I can see some common threads. Whereas, the God-and-Satan-obsessed world of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, with its popes, its kings and queens, its saints, its feudalism and its brutally oppressed peasantry -- well, that stuff is wild, and, for me, a whole hell of a lot harder to wrap my mind around. Which is why I find trying to understand it both more challenging, and more intrinsically interesting and rewarding.

I remember that one of the assignments from Siraisi's class was to read a book about some event during the period and write a paper about it. The book I chose was Judith C. Brown's Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy, which was every bit as fascinating as it sounds. It concerned a 17th century abbess and mystic who achieved some prominence because of her visions of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. But she became controversial, and an investigation revealed that not only were her "miracles" bogus (two words: fake stigmata), but that she'd engaged in a passionate lesbian affair with another nun (they'd have carnal relations whenever the abbess's body was "possessed" by a lustful male angel).

I found that book so intriguing that after the class was over, I went on to read some of the others on the list Professor Siraisi provided, including Natalie Zemon Davis's The Return of Martin Guerre, about a famous case of imposture in 16th century France, and also Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms. I enjoyed them both, but am especially fond of The Cheese and the Worms, which is a thoroughly wonderful book. It concerns a miller whose eccentric worldview got him hauled before the Roman Inquisition. What's great about it is that it uses this one highly idiosyncratic, and ultimately quite sad, case to reconstruct an entire world. It's a classic of its kind.

Anyway, back to Professor Siraisi -- she's a historian of medicine focusing on the period of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. I'd actually never realized she was so prominent. I'm not familiar with her work, but the description of it on the MacArthur website makes it sound well worth seeking out, even for a non-historian like me (it's described as "lively," which I translate as meaning "unlike most academic history, is written with sufficient style, color and skill to make it appealing even to the layperson").

One other thing I remember vividly about that class: it was the course for which I wrote my first college paper. I was very nervous and insecure about it, because I'd gone to a public high school which required very little writing and didn't offer much in the way of advanced placement or other college-level classes. I breathed a huge sigh of relief when my paper was returned to me and I saw that I'd gotten an A.

Comments

[Daniel S. Goldberg]

If you'll forgive the colloquialism, Siraisi is a total bad@ss. As someone preparing a dissertation that involves the study of rhetoric, medicine, and Renaissance humanism (as a means of illuminating, believe it or not, the contemporary undertreatment of pain), her work is indispensable, and incredibly incisive.