Dr Beatrice Bottomley

Beatrice Bottomley studies connected histories of knowledge across the premodern Islamicate world and Mediterranean, encompassing the histories of science, technology, and everyday knowledge, and extending to visual and material culture. Following a PhD in the History of Knowledge at the Warburg Institute (University of London) funded by the London Arts and Humanities Partnership, Beatrice was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bologna. 

Beatrice is currently completing a book based on her doctoral thesis, How to Be Things with Words: From Theories to Practices of Language in the Premodern Islamicate World, c. 900–1400. It examines how premodern scholars and anonymous authors writing in Arabic and Persian theorised the relationship between words, thoughts, and things and used it as a framework for practical techniques to manipulate the natural world. These practices range from calculating the nature (hot, cold, humid, or dry) of a substance through the letters of its name to healing a patient by inscribing certain letters on a bowl from which they could drink. The book studies texts, marginalia, and images to reconstruct the widespread transmission of these theories and practices through a transregional network stretching from the Iberian Peninsula to the Black Sea. By foregrounding distinct ways of making knowledge that were actively cultivated by scholars in the premodern Islamicate world, How to Be Things with Words challenges the characterisation of premodern Arabic and Persian sources as merely passive transmitters of theoretical knowledge from Greco-Roman Antiquity to early modern Europe. For the authors this book studies, letters and words were more than just vehicles for thought; they offered a system for encoding, reading, and transforming the natural world.

Beatrice's new project, provisionally titled Making Nature in the Medieval Islamicate World: The Generation of Humans, Animals, Plants, and Minerals, c. 800–1300, offers the first comprehensive account of theories and techniques for the generation of humans and other natural things in the medieval Islamicate world. Generation, as the making of beings, draws together the diverse ways in which people thought about and experienced the cosmos, the natural world, and the human body. This project asks how, in a period of intense social and intellectual change, scholars theorised the making of human and non-human animals, plants, and minerals; how techniques for manipulating generation were developed by scholars and laypeople, and recorded and communicated in practical texts, images, and objects; and how these theories and techniques were fuelled by new encounters among humans, natural things, and texts within an increasingly expansive Islamicate world. 

As part of ERC project UseFool, Beatrice edited and translated chapters of a medieval Arabic handbook, which contains recipes using animal parts, plants, and minerals. She collaborated with the chemist Marianna Marchini to remake some of these recipes. These experiments, described in a forthcoming article for Nuncius, combine textual scholarship with experiential methods to uncover the layers of theoretical and practical knowledge embodied in these recipes. Another article in progress examines the use and reception of contraceptive and aphrodisiac techniques within the context of enslavement, revealing intersections in premodern Arabic sources between discussions of generation and understandings of human difference. Some of this knowledge is attributed to free and enslaved women previously dismissed by scholars as fictional characters; the article argues that these 'characters' in fact bear witness to alternative lines of knowledge transmission and to the flows of people that were enabled, and sometimes compelled, within an expanding Islamicate world. This research reflects on how to account for the roles of diverse actors in the production and transmission of knowledge when working with an asymmetric textual tradition. All of these projects interrogate the disciplinary boundaries of the history of knowledge, seeking to construct new histories and philosophies of science that bring together multiple ways of knowing across connected geographies.

Beatrice is committed to developing sustainable research practices and creative collaborations with different communities that interrogate the social systems in which histories of science and technology unfold. 

Publications

Monographs

How to Be Things with Words: From Theories to Practices of Language in the Premodern Islamicate World. In progress, expression of interest from editors of Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization (Cambridge University Press).

Editions and translations

Ibn Zuhr's Book of Occult Properties, edited, translated, and annotated by Lucia Raggetti, Marco Baschetti, Beatrice Bottomley, Sara Fani, Andrea Negri, Alessandra Scimone, and Amine Xhakoni. In progress, under contract with Brill. This edition and translation is a collective output of the ERC project UseFool.

Journal articles

Beatrice Bottomley and Marianna Marchini, 'From Text to Technique: Recipes for Writing Tricks and Magical Inks in al-Irāqī’s ʿUyūn al- haqāʾiq.' Nuncius: Studies and Sources in the Material and Visual History of Science. Reviewed, accepted, and in press, forthcoming Winter 2026.

'Being Things with Words: From Ibn ʿArabī’s Theory of Language to Practice.' Micrologus: Nature, Sciences, and Medieval Societies. Reviewed, accepted, and in press, forthcoming Autumn 2026.

Book chapters

Beatrice Bottomley and Arianna Dalla Costa, 'Ars combinatoria: Deciphering the Earthly and Divine in the Medieval World and Beyond.' In Media Technologies and the Digital Humanities in Mediaeval and Early Modern Studies, edited by Katharine Scherff and Lane Sobehrad. London: Taylor and Francis, 2023, 80–95.

Book reviews

'Sorcery or Science? Contesting Knowledge and Practice in West African Sufi Texts by Ariela Marcus-Sells.' Journal of Islamic Studies, 34 (September 2023): 437–440. 

'Translation Movement and Acculturation in the Mediaeval Islamic World by Labeeb Bsoul.' The Oxford Critical Comparative and Translation Review (March 2021).

Selected media 

Interview with Federico Campagna for podcast Overmorrow's Library, Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève, June 2022. 

Essay 'GPT-3, Divine Writing and Other Realities.' Warburg Institute Blog, 18 May 2021. 

Selected public engagement 

Reading and Conversation 'Agitated Air: Poems After Ibn Arabi' with Marina Warner, Yasmine Seale, and Robin Moger, The Warburg Institute, March 2022. 

'Reading and Observing the Lunar Mansions', seminar series, The Warburg Institute, November 2021.

Workshop and Lecture with calligrapher Soraya Syed, The Warburg Institute, October 2021.