Biography
Alexandra Marraccini received her BA from Yale University in History (2009), where she was a Bartels Fellow at the Yale Center for British Art and a recipient of the Van Sinderen Book Collecting Prize. She earned her MA in Medieval Studies at University of Toronto (2010-11), where she continued to work on book illustration as a locus of discourse about nature and the structure of natural inquiry. Her research focuses on Late Medieval and Early Modern scientific images, particularly alchemical and medical material, in England, Scotland, Germany, and the Netherlands. Her other scholarly interests include emblem books, the aesthetic of the German baroque, border illumination in later medieval manuscripts, and book illustration as a mode of intellectual and cultural history. She is active in using the digital humanities as both tool and research methodology, and is an editor at Arkyves.org (published by Brill). Currently, she is writing on alchemical images and diagrams as case studies in the visual construction of scientific knowledge in Late Medieval and Early Modern Northern Europe. At present she is doing doctoral dissertation research at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and will be the Sir William Stirling Maxwell Fellow at the Stirling Maxwell Centre for the Study of Text/Image Cultures, at the University of Glasgow, in the 2016-17 academic year.