William Eamon

William Eamon (born June 5, 1946) is Distinguished Achievement Professor, Regents Professor of History, and Dean of the Honors College at New Mexico State University. He is a specialist in the history of science and has published widely on various aspects of medieval and early modern science, medicine, and technology. His research focuses primarily on the history science and medicine in early modern Italy and Spain. His most influential work is on the history of the "books of secrets" tradition in medieval and early modern culture. His work has also looked at the history of magic and the occult sciences, the history of alchemy, and science and popular culture in early modern Europe.

Biography

Eamon was born in Williston, ND and raised in Medicine Lake, MT, a small farming community in northeastern Montana. He studied history at the University of Montana, where he received his BA (1968) and MA (1970). He completed his PhD in history of science from the University of Kansas (1977), where he studied with the distinguished medievalist and historian of botany Jerry Stannard. After a year as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Miami, he joined the Department of History at New Mexico State University in 1976, and served as the department chair for three years. He became Director of the University Honors Program in 1995 and led the creation of the Honors College at New Mexico State University, which he currently serves as Dean. He has lived and conducted research for extended periods in Wurzburg, Florence, Venice, and Valencia.

Eamon has received numerous grants and fellowships for his research, including research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Renaissance Society of America, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He was a Fulbright Fellow in Germany, a Villa I Tatti Fellow at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (Florence), and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Wurzburg (Germany) and the University of Valencia.

Professional Experience

2005 Dean, Honors College, New Mexico State University
2012 Distinguished Achievement Professor, New Mexico State University
2004 Regents Professor, New Mexico State University
2004 Visiting Professor, University of Valencia (Spain)
1994 Professor of History, New Mexico State University
1994-95 Villa I Tatti Fellow, Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Florence, Italy
1991-95 Head, Department of History, New Mexico State University
1986-87 Guest Professor, Institute for the History of Medicine, University of Würzburg, Germany
1985-86 Fellow, Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin
1981-82 Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow, History of Science, Harvard University
1976-81 Assistant Professor of History, New Mexico State University
1973-74 Visiting Instructor of History, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida

Honors and Awards

2007 University Research Council Award for Exceptional Achievement in Creative Scholarly Activity, New Mexico State University
2004 S.P. and Margaret Manasse Research Chair,New Mexico State University
2005 25th Annual Church Memorial Lecturer, Brown University
2004 Klaus Jankofsky Lecturer in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, University of Minnesota, Duluth
1985 Jack Williamson Lecturer, Eastern New Mexico University

Selected Publications

Books

The Professor of Secrets: Mystery, Medicine, and Alchemy in Renaissance Italy (Washington: 2010)
Beyond the Black Legend: Spain and the Scientific Revolution / Mas allá de la Leyenda Negra: España y la Revolución Científica, ed. Victor Navarro Brotòns and William Eamon (Valencia: 2007)
Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton: 1994). Nominated for Pulitzer Prize; winner of the Association of American Publishers’s History Book Award
La Scienza e i segreti della natura: I ‘libri di segreti’ nella cultura medievale e moderna (Italian translation of Science and the Secrets of Nature; Genova: 1999) Co-editor, Culturhistorische Caleidoscoop (Gent: 1992)

Articles and Book Chapters

“On the Skins of Goats and Sheep: (Un)masking the Secrets of Nature in Early Modern Popular Culture,” in Visual Rhetorics of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe, ed. T. McCall, S. Roberts, and G. Fiorenza. Philadelphia: 2012
“Astrology in Renaissance Society,” in Companion to Astrology in the Renaissance, ed. B. Dooley (Leiden: 2013)
“Science and Medicine in Early Modern Venice,” in Handbook of Venetian History, 1450-1797, ed. E. Dursteler (Leiden: 2013)
“Masters of Fire: Italian Alchemists in the Court of Philip II,” in Chymia: Science and Nature in Early Modern Europe (1450-1750), ed. M.l López Pérez and D. Kahn (Cambridge: 2010)
“How to Read a Book of Secrets,” in Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, 1500-1800, ed. A. Rankin and E. Leong (London: 2011)
“‘Nuestros males no son constitucionales, sino circunstanciales’: The Black Legend and the History of Early Modern Spanish Science,” Colorado Review of Hispanic Studies 7 (2009): 13-30
“Appearance, Artifice, and Reality: Collecting Secrets in Courtly Culture,” in The Gentleman, the Virtuoso, the Inquirer: Vincencio Juan de Lastanosa and the Art of Collecting in Early Modern Spain, ed. M. Rey-Bueno and M. López-Pérez (Cambridge: 2008), 127-43
“The Canker Friar: Piety and Intrigue in an Era of New Diseases,” in Piety and Plague in Europe: From Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, ed. F.Mormando and T. Worcester (Kirksville, MO: 2007), 156-76
“Spain and the Scientific Revolution: Historiographical Questions and Conjectures” (with Victor Navarro Brotòns), in Beyond the Black Legend: Spain and the Scientific Revolution, ed. V. Navarro Brotòns and W. Eamon (Valencia: 2007), pp. 21-32
“Markets, Piazzas, and Villages,” in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3, ed. K. Park and L. Daston (Cambridge: 2006), pp. 206-23
“The Charlatan’s Trial: An Italian Surgeon in the Court of King Philip II, 1576-1577,” Cronos 8 (2005), 1-30
“Pharmaceutical Self-Fashioning, or How to Get Rich and Famous in the Renaissance Medical Fashion Industry,” Pharmacy in History, 45 (2003), 123-29
“The Scientific Renaissance,” in A Companion to the Worlds of the Renaissance, ed. G. Ruggiero (London: 2002), pp. 403-24
“Alchemy in Popular Culture: Leonardo Fioravanti and the Search for the Philosopher’s Stone,” Early Science and Medicine, 5 (2000), 196-213
“Cannibalism and Contagion: Framing Syphilis in Counter-Reformation Italy,” Early Science and Medicine, 3 (1998), 1-31 “Natural Magic and Utopia in the Cinquecento: Campanella, the Della Porta Circle, and the Revolt of Calabria,” Memorie Domenicane, n.s., 26 (1995), 369-402
“Science as a Hunt,” Physis 31 (1994), 393-432
“ ‘With the Rules of Life and an Enema’: Leonardo Fioravanti’s Medical Primitivism,” in Renaissance and Revolution: Humanists, Scholars, Craftsmen, and Natural Philosophers in Early Modern Europe, ed. J.V. Field and F.A.J.L. James (London: 1993), pp. 29-44
“Court, Academy, and Printing House: Patronage and Scientific Careers in Late Renaissance Italy,” in Patronage and Institutions, ed. B. Moran (Woodbridge: 1991), pp. 25-50
“Plebs amat empirica: Nicholas of Poland and His Critique of the Medieval Medical Establishment,” (with Gundolf Keil), Sudhoffs Archiv 71 (1987), 18- 96
“From the Secrets of Nature to Public Knowledge: The Origins of the Concept of Openness in Science,” Minerva 23 (1985), 321-47
“Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Science,” Sudhoffs Archiv 69 (1985), 26-49
“Science and Popular Culture in Early Modern Italy: The ‘Professors of Secrets’ and Their Books,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 16 (1985), 471-85
“Drunk With the Cup of Liberty,” Southwest Review 70 (Winter, 1985), 534-41
“Arcana Disclosed: The Advent of Printing, the Books of Secrets Tradition, and the Development of Experimental Science in the Sixteenth Century,” History of Science 22 (1984), 111-50
“Technology as Magic in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance,” Janus 70 (1983), 171-212
“New Light on Robert Boyle and the Discovery of Colour Indicators,” Ambix 27 (1980), 204 209