Professor John Henderson

John Henderson is Emeritus Professor of Italian Renaissance History, Birkbeck, University
of London, Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He is Director of the research project ‘Public Health and Private Health in Pre-Modern Italy’, at the Medici Archive Project in Florence. His research has been supported by the Wellcome Trust in Cambridge (Dept. of the History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, and Birkbeck) and he has held fellowships at Villa I Tatti, Harvard Center of Renaissance Studies, Florence, and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris.

John has long been interested in two major historical themes, which are as relevant today as they were in renaissance and early modern Europe. The first is the way in which society dealt with poverty; by examining the poor relief and welfare structures in the past we can discover not just the origins of present systems, but also the enduring attitudes and prejudices towards poorer members of our society. The second is how society coped with epidemics, especially the two major diseases which dominated this period: plague and syphilis. Once again, examining reactions in the past to emergencies caused by both acute and chronic epidemic disease can help us to understand why and how societies of the 20th and 21st centuries reacted to new epidemics, brought into focus most recently by COVID. His approach is inter-disciplinary with as much emphasis placed on written sources as on visual and material culture.

John will be contributing to the Special Subject, ‘Politics, Art and Culture in the Italian Renaissance: Venice & Florence, c. 1475–1525’.

John’s most recent books include: Florence Under Siege: Surviving Plague in an Early Modern City (Yale University Press, 2019) (translated: La peste di Firenze. Come la citta’ sopravvisse alla terribile epidemia del 1630-1631, Rome: Newton Compton, 2021); Plague and the City, edited with Lukas Engelmann and Christos Lynteris (Routledge, 2019); and Representing Infirmity. Diseased Bodies in Renaissance Italy, edited with Fredrika Jacobs and Jonathan Nelson (Routledge, 2021). He has recently completed an interdisciplinary study for CUP of the Great Pox in Renaissance. He is co-editor with Jonathan Nelson of the Cambridge University Press book series Renaissance Elements, and with Peter Howard of the Routledge series The Body and the City.