Convenors

The Scientific Recreation / Recreational Science in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe Conference has been organised by Dr Eveline Szarka, University College London and Harvard University, and Vanessa da Silva Baptista, University College London:

Dr Eveline Szarka

Dr Eveline Szarka is a research fellow (Swiss National Science Foundation) at the History Department at University College London. She will transfer to Harvard University in February 2022, where she will continue to work on her project titled Clandestine Words. Practices of Secret Communication in the History of Knowledge (1500-1800). She is investigating early modern information security techniques (for example cryptography or steganography) in German and English printed and manuscript handbooks. Her research interests lie in the interdisciplinarity, intermodality, and intermateriality of secret communication practices as related to the history of knowledge, technology, and science. With regards to scientific recreation, Dr Szarka is particularly fascinated by the various ways to produce invisible inks and their respective visibility activation agents and conceptualisations of practical knowledge.

Dr Szarka earned her B.A. in German philology and history and her M.A. in German philology and medieval studies from the University of Zurich, Switzerland. She finished her Ph.D. in history at the University of Zurich in July 2020. During both her undergraduate and graduate studies, she was a visiting student at the University of Cambridge, UK. Her Ph.D. dissertation titled Sinn für Gespenster. Spukphänomene in der reformierten Schweiz (1570-1730) (engl. A Sense for Spectres: Hauntings in Post-Reformation Switzerland (1570-1730)) focuses on the impact of the Protestant Reformation on the belief in ghosts and spirits in Switzerland from 1570-1730 and will be published in March 2022.

Vanessa da Silva Baptista

Vanessa is a fourth year PhD candidate in the UCL Department of History studying part-time. Her thesis, ‘A Cultural History of Magic Tricks in Late Medieval Europe’ focuses on magic tricks as an understood form of entertainment in the later middle age and engages with the work of modern illusionist magicians to distinguish magic trick from ritual magic and fraud. Through a careful analysis of 100 predominately 14th and 15th century recipe books manuscripts, her research aim to define magic tricks as a distinct type of recipe literature and to identify who read, performed, and collected magic tricks – and why.  The project investigates the boundaries between various crafts, practical alchemy, and household recipes. Vanessa is particularly interested in the concepts of play, experimentation, deceit and artifice within medieval culture.

Vanessa hopes to soon be able to recreate some of these medieval magic tricks to better understand how, and if, they were performed and experienced. In the future, she hopes that these recreation can form part of a broader public outreach project linking the sciences, medieval history and performance.