Beatrice Barbara Anne Bottomley

My research examines connected histories of knowledge across the premodern and early modern Mediterranean. I am particularly interested in the production and transmission of ideas, texts, and techniques and what these processes reveal about moments of epistemic continuity and change across geographies, periods, and disciplines.

As part of the UseFool team, I am editing and translating The Best of True Information and the Explanation of Their Ways, an Arabic handbook of recipes for illusions, tricks, remedies, and wonders by the thirteenth-century alchemist al-ʿIrāqī. In addition to contributing to the team’s reproduction of recipes and mapping of sources, I am examining the diverse practical techniques employed by actors outside of scholarly spheres to produce vegetal, animal, and mineral remedies in order to understand the extent to which they drew upon implied theoretical frameworks concerning the structure and manipulation of the natural world.

My other current research interests include ideas of 'natural' and 'artificial' generation across diverse streams of knowledge, from alchemy and medicine to horticulture and husbandry.