Eleanor Webb is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania where she specializes in early modern European history. Her research interests center on intellectual history and the social history of knowledge production, particularly pertaining to the development of scientific thought, academic freedoms, and the linguistic and literary cultures of education. These themes animate her dissertation project, which studies sixteenth and seventeenth-century Italian academies and their relationships with university learning. Her work has been supported by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Folger Institute, the Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry, and the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. She holds a B.A. in History and an M.A. in Renaissance Studies from the University of Warwick (UK).
Eleanor Webb
Wolf Humanities Center Doctoral Fellow
2025—2026 Forum on Truth
Eleanor Webb
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Between Studium and Accademia: Education, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy
In sixteenth and seventeenth-century Italy, learned academies brought together individuals from diverse intellectual backgrounds to pursue programs of research and publication. They did so at a time when traditional institutions of learning – the universities – were disrupted by warfare and restricted by Catholic censorship laws. The convergence of different forms of knowledge at academies often undermined tightly held beliefs about philosophical, theological and scientific truths, and produced dynamic reexaminations of how such truths are pursued and expressed. The academies explored how immutable philosophical truths could be effectively communicated in changeable vernacular languages, elevated the genre of vernacular poetry to a pedagogical discourse of truth, probed the relationship between truth and authority in pursuit of new scientific knowledge, and sought to protect scholarly freedoms from encroaching censorship.