About

Brad Bouley is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2012. His research focuses on the histories of religion and science in the early modern period, particularly within the Italian context. Bouley's scholarly work explores the intersections of faith, medicine, and scientific inquiry during this era, contributing to our understanding of how religious and scientific ideas influenced each other in early modern Europe. He has authored several books, including 'The Barberini Butchers: Meat, Murder, and Warfare in Early Modern Italy,' published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2026, and 'The Dragon and the Star: A Narrative History of the Scientific Revolution,' published by Bloomsbury in 2027. His research projects include a study titled 'Bewitching the Duke: Disability, Medicine, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Italy,' based on archival documents from Rome and Parma in the early seventeenth century. Additionally, he investigates the spaces where medicine was practiced in early modern Rome and the role of the Inquisition as a patron of medical studies. Beyond his research, Bouley teaches courses on the Renaissance, Reformation, and the History of Science, with future offerings on topics such as the Inquisition and Heresy, Niccolo Machiavelli, the Trial of Galileo, and a comparative history of baseball. His professional activities include fellowships and awards from prestigious institutions, reflecting his active engagement in the field of early modern history.

Research topics

• Ancient history
• History
• Art
• Theology
• Philosophy
• Art history
• Traditional medicine
• Medicine
• Biology

Selected publications

• Miracles and Holy Bodies

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-12-12

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• John Christopoulos. <i>Abortion in Early Modern Italy</i>.

  The American Historical Review · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Ancient history
  • Biology

  Journal Article John Christopoulos. Abortion in Early Modern Italy. Get access John Christopoulos. Abortion in Early Modern Italy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021. Pp. 368. Cloth $53.00. Bradford A Bouley Bradford A Bouley University of California, Santa Barbara, US Email: bouley@history.ucsb.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 1, March 2024, Pages 327–328, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad571 Published: 13 March 2024

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• A Plague of Meat: Food, Politics, and Warfare in Early Modern Italy

  Isis · 2023-08-16

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In the early seventeenth century, the amount of meat available in Rome increased exponentially, with consumption reaching a pound per person per day in the 1630s. There were cultural and political reasons for this surge: in the wake of the Reformation, a series of popes sought to turn the city of Rome into a model “city on a hill,” representing the ideal of a Catholic state under a powerful ruler. However, to bring such large amounts of food from the countryside to Roman tables required enormous efforts on the part of a variety of bureaucrats and local artisans working for the papal regime. This essay will briefly examine the efforts of two of those groups that helped create Rome’s “meat moment”: the contatori who inspected and distributed animals brought from the countryside to Rome and the butchers in the city. In the end, the dramatic increase in supply was not sustainable and would result in both political and ecological upheaval.

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• <i>Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Renaissance Italy</i>. Sharon T. Strocchia.

  Early Modern Women An Interdisciplinary Journal · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Traditional medicine
  • Art
  • Medicine
  PublisherDOI

• Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Renaissance Italy. Sharon T. Strocchia.

  Early Modern Women An Interdisciplinary Journal · 2021-04-05

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• Digesting Faith

  Osiris · 2020 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Philosophy
  • Theology

  In seventeenth-century Rome, the consumption of meat was on the rise. By the 1630s, Romans were eating double the amount of meat they had consumed fifty years previously, even accounting for growth in population. At the same time that all this meat was being consumed, the papacy came to fiercely defend another comestible: the wafer eaten in the Eucharist. These two products came to be at the center of papal reform in Rome. Eating meat, especially at Easter, and regularly partaking in the body of Christ signaled one's adherence to Catholicism and obedience to the Pope. But the matter was not that simple; accusations of cannibalism in Rome—both real and imagined—led to lengthy medical and theological discussion over how the body digests food. Furthermore, most contemporary medical advice did not recommend heavy consumption of meat. This article thus explores how an alliance between the medical community and the papacy sought to remake alimentary and anatomical ideas related to digestion and healthy eating in early modern Rome. Various sections will detail evolving theories of digestion in the papal capital; how such theories were applied to theological and practical issues such as giving the Eucharist to the sick; whether cannibals could gain sustenance from human flesh; and physician commentary on rising meat consumption in the city. In the end, medical expertise allied with Church authority to defend the aims of the Counter-Reformation papacy.

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• Christopher Kissane. Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe.

  The American Historical Review · 2019-11-06

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe, Christopher Kissane asserts that he is using food “as a prism to offer new refractions of life in a period structured—from farm to table, faith to status—around food” (6). In this regard, he is following the methodology set by recent scholars such as Emma C. Spary, who in Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris (2012) used food as a way to understand the culture of the eighteenth-century French society, or Caroline Walker Bynum, who used food earlier, in her 1987 Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, as a way to understand the lives of medieval holy women. Kissane’s work differs from these in part due to its breadth: Kissane focuses in succession on the converso trials in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Castile (part 1), the early Reformation in Huldrych Zwingli’s Zurich (part 2), and witchcraft trials in the early modern Shetland Islands (part 3, and especially chap. 7), all of which he intends to reinterpret by focusing on food. These choices were not casual; rather, Kissane seeks to throw new light on two intensely studied and well known events—the Inquisition in Iberia, and the Reformation in Zurich—and then use his methodology to provide insight into a society—the early modern Shetlands—that is otherwise poorly known and poorly documented. In the end, Kissane produces a work that succeeds in providing new perspective on well-studied events in European history and ably demonstrates the relevance of using the most quotidian of objects—food—as a key material lens through which to understand the European past.

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• The Warfare Between Science &amp; Religion: The Idea that Wouldn’t Die

  History Reviews of New Books · 2019-09-12

  article1st authorCorresponding

  "The Warfare Between Science & Religion: The Idea that Wouldn’t Die." History: Reviews of New Books, 47(6), pp. 158–159

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• The Heart of Heresy: Inquisition, Medicine, and False Sanctity 34

  2019-03-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This paper examines the engagement of various officials and tribunals of the Roman Inquisition with the new anatomical studies of the early modern period. It argues that although inquisition officers were frequently very aware of the latest medical theories, they actively chose not to employ anatomical or medical evidence when evaluating the unusual physical symptoms that might be associated with false or affected sanctity. This attitude stands in contrast to the employment of anatomical knowledge by other ecclesiastical institutions – e.g. the Congregation of Rites – and suggests that the Inquisition held a different, and perhaps more modern, view about the relationship between natural knowledge and religion.

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• Papal Anatomy in the News: Bodies and Politics in the Early Modern Catholic World

  Sixteenth Century Journal · 2018-09-01

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Frequent coauthors

• Paula Findlen

  Stanford University

  2 shared

• Corey Tazzara

  1 shared

• Renata Ago

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• UC Senate Faculty Research Grant (2024-2026)
• Villa I Tatti Fellowship in Renaissance Studies (2017-2018)
• USC Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities (201…
• American Academy Rome Prize Fellowship (2011-2012)
• Fulbright Fellowship for Italy (2009-2010)