Melissa Reynolds
She/Herm.reynolds1@tcu.edu817-257-1290Reed Hall 330TCU Box 297260
Program Affiliations
Education
PhD, History, Rutgers University
MA, History, The University of Alabama
BA, English, with Honors, summa cum laude, The University of Alabama
Bio
Melissa Reynolds is a historian of early modern Europe with research interests in the history of medicine and science, the history of the body, and the history of material texts. She teaches courses on the history of later medieval and early modern Europe, on the history of science, and on the history of communications technologies. Prior to joining the faculty at TCU, she taught at Princeton and at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a Cotsen Fellow in the Society of Fellows, and a Mellon Fellow in the Wolf Humanities Center, respectively. In addition to her published books and scholarly articles, Dr. Reynolds also co-edits the online publication The Recipes Project.
Courses Taught
- HIST 10213 The World Expanded: Europe 1348-1789
- HIST 30623 History of Science: Scientific Revolutions
- HIST 30693 Technologies of History from Cuneiform to Coding
- HIST 50970 Graduate Seminar in the History of Science
Areas of Focus
Early Modern European History, History of Medicine and Science, Gender History
Books:
Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print (Chicago: University of Chicago press, 2024)
Articles & Essays:
- "Of Plants and Providence: Assessing Drugs, Difference, and Divine Will in Timothy Bright's The Sufficiencie of English Medicines (1580)," forthcoming in Renaissance Quarterly 78, no. 4 (Winter 2025)
- Co-author (with Hannah Frydman), “Introduction: Histories of Abortion Beyond Roe,” Gender & History 36, no. 2 (Summer 2024): 289–294.
- “The Sururgia of Nicholas Neesbett: Writing Medical Authority in Later Medieval England,” Social History of Medicine 35, no. 1 (February 2022): 144–169.
- “How to Cure a Horse, or, the Difference Between the Knowledge of Experience and the Experience of Knowledge,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 52, no. 4 (2022): 546–552.
- “‘Here is a good boke to lerne’: Practical books, the coming of the press, and the search for knowledge, ca. 1400–1560,” Journal of British Studies 58, no. 2 (April 2019): 259–288. (Honorable Mention, 2020 Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography Essay Prize)
- Finalist, John Ben Snow Prize, North American Conference on British Studies, 2025
- Paul Oskar Kristeller Fellowship, Renaissance Society of America, 2024
- J. Worth Estes Prize, American Association for the History of Medicine, 2023
- Honorable Mention, Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography Essay Prize, 2020
- Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, 2018
- Schalleck Award, Medieval Academy of America, 2017
- Article reviewer for Social History of Medicine; Centaurus: The Journal of the European Society of the History of Science; Ambix: The Journal of the Society of the History of Alchemy and Chemistry
- Discipline Representative to the Renaissance Society of America for the History of Medicine and Science
- Liaison to the American Historical Association for the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender
Last Updated: September 22, 2025