Alessandra Foscati holds a PhD in Medieval History from the University of Bologna. She was a research fellow at the University of Bologna (Department of Cultural Heritage), a researcher at the Warburg Institute, School of Advanced Study, University of London, as holder of a Francis Yates Fellowship; at the University of Lisbon (School of Arts and Humanities) as a member of the project ‘Gynecia. Rodericus in Castro Lusitanus and the Ancient Medical Tradition about Gynaecology and Embryology’; at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven), as holder of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions – Seal of Excellence project: Shifting Disease Names in the Middle Ages: Latin and Vernacular In Different Texts Genres (SIDELINE).

Her research topics mainly concern the history of women’s diseases and childbirth, in particular Caesarean section, and the study of the complexity of the nosological lexicon of the past and its semantic transformations.

She has published studies on the history of ergotism, syphilis and on the relationship between the sick and the healers between the Middle Ages and the Early modern period.

She is the author of volumes and numerous publications in international journals.

Associate Professor at UniCamillus.

Some of her most significant publications are:

2023. Foscati, Le meraviglie del parto. Donare la vita tra Medioevo ed Età moderna, Torino, Einaudi, 2023.
2024. Foscati, Saint Anthony’s Fire from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2020. 
2025. Foscati, ‘«Dicitur lupus, quia in die comedit unam gallinam». Beyond the Metaphor: Lupus Disease between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period’, Mediterranea. International Journal on the Transfer of Knowledge, 8 (2023), pp. 27-53.

A. Foscati, ‘From the Ancient Myth of the Caesars to the Medieval and Renaissance Tradition. The Practice of Caesarean Section in De universa mulierum medicina by Rodrigo de Castro’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Science, 76.1 (2020), pp. 1-19