In 1695, after completing the chapters on Wales for a new edition of Camden’s Britannia, the Welsh naturalist Edward Lhwyd (1660-1709) published A Design of a British Dictionary, Historical and Geographical; With an Essay, Intituled, Archaeologia Britannica: and a Natural History of Wales, outlining a multi-volume project for which he sought patronage. Two years later Lhwyd distributed 4000 copies of ‘Parochial Queries’ for potential informants. Predecessors for such queries included Robert Boyle’s ‘General Heads’, Lhwyd’s mentor Robert Plot, the Scottish physician Robert Sibbald, and queries from the 1650s on Irish resettlement. Lhwyd argued that the Welsh were the indigenous inhabitants of Britain, which had been colonized over time by the Romans and others. The first volume of Archaeologia Britannica (1707) compared Welsh with other Celtic languages to make this case. Lhwyd’s project was one of preservation and documentation against English cultural and linguistic hegemony.
Anita Guerrini is a historian of science and medicine, retired as the Horning Professor in the Humanities at Oregon State University, where she served from 2008 to 2018. Prior to that, she held a professorship in History and Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She was educated at Connecticut College and Oxford University and earned a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from Indiana University.Her research spans a broad historical range, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, with particular focus on anatomy, natural history, the history of animals, the environment, and the history of food. Much of her work centers on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Western Europe. Additionally, she has examined the role of history in ecological restoration and explored the environmental history of southern California.
Her book The Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV’s Paris, published in May 2015, was awarded the 2018 Pfizer Prize of the History of Science Society for best scholarly book. Her most recent work is the second revised edition of Experimenting with Humans and Animals, published in August 2022. Other publications include Obesity and Depression in the Enlightenment, a biography of the physician George Cheyne (c. 1671–1743), as well as the first edition of Experimenting with Humans and Animals and the annotated bibliography Natural History and the New World. With Patricia Fumerton at UCSB, she co-edited Ballads and Broadsides in Britain 1500–1800 and has also edited or co-edited several special issues, most recently a special issue of Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal for the History of Science on “Biodiversity and the History of Scientific Environments,” co-edited with Georgina Montgomery.
She is currently writing a biography of William Harvey (1578–1657), under contract with Reaktion Press for its Renaissance Lives series. Her next project is a study of giants, fossil bones, and national identities in early modern Europe. A founding member of the Collection Ecologies research collective, she is also engaged in research on the collection and display of human remains. A full list of her publications is available in the CV below. Further insights can be found on her blog, Anatomia Animalia.
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