John Henderson

Professor John Henderson

BA MA PhD FRHistS

John is Emeritus Professor of Italian Renaissance History at Birkbeck, University of London, and has written extensively on the social and religious history of medieval and early modern Tuscany, with a specialism in history of medicine, public health and epidemic disease. 

John Henderson

John completed his doctorate in 1983 at the University of London on the religious and social history of Renaissance Florence, and subsequently moved to the University of Cambridge as a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow, following which he joined the Centre for Metropolitan History, Institute of Historical Research, University of London, as co-Director of an ESRC-funded comparative research project on plague in early modern London and Florence. He then returned to Cambridge to take up a ten year post as Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow in Renaissance History of Medicine at the University of Cambridge, held jointly between the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, Department of Geography.

John moved to Birkbeck in 2003, as Wellcome Trust Reader in Renaissance History, subsequently being appointed in 2007 as Professor of Italian renaissance History, and Emeritus Professor from January 2022. John has held a series of international Fellowships and Visiting Professorships, including at Villa I Tatti, Harvard University’s Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes et Sciences Sociales in Paris, and the European University Institute in Florence. Most recently, between 2016-2019, he spent the autumn term as Research Professor at the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Monash University, Melbourne. Most recently, in Michaelmas Term 2023, he was a Visiting Fellow in History at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford.

John is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a founding member and chair of the International Network for the History of Hospitals.

Research interests

John has long been interested in two major historical themes, which are as relevant today as they were in medieval and renaissance 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 the new epidemics including AIDS, SARS, malaria, and Ebola and most recently Covid. The research interests have led to the publication of a series of books and articles, such as The Renaissance Hospital. These include Saving the Body and Saving the Soul (Yale University Press, 2008), and most recently on plague, including Plague and the City, ed. with Lukas Englemann and Christos Lynteris (Routledge, London, 2018).

The book which attracted most attention was Florence Under Siege. Surviving Plague in an early modern city (Yale University Press, 2019). John is also interested in the representation of disease in the past, and is co-editor of the Representing Infirmity in Renaissance and Early Modern Italy, with Jonathan Nelson and Fredrika Jacobs (Routledge, 2020). This is a theme which is developed further in his forthcoming Cambridge University Press book, The French Disease in Renaissance Italy. Representation and Experience (September 2024).

On-going research projects include studies of popular medical practice in early modern Italy, and environment and health in early modern Tuscany.

Recent research projects include Director of ‘Public Health & Private Health in Pre-Modern Italy’, at the Medici Archive Project in Florence; and until 2018 Member of the Advisory Committee of the ERC-funded research project 'Visualising Plague' at CRASSH, University of Cambridge.

John is also co-editor of two book series: Routledge’s The Body and the City, co-edited with Peter Howard, and Cambridge University Press’s The Renaissance, co-edited with Jonathan K. Nelson, and part of CUP’s Elements series.