Our people

Dr Natalie Tomas

Honorary Fellow - Gender and Women's History Research Centre

Areas of expertise: women and gender; epistolarity; social and cultural history; political culture; Medici family; early modern studies

ORCID ID: 0000-0002-6405-3852

Email: natalie.tomas@acu.edu.au

Location: ACU Melbourne Campus

Natalie Tomas is a Research Fellow at the Gender and Women's History Research Centre in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. She is a social and cultural historian of the early modern period interested in the exercise of power by women in the public sphere including how female leadership has been perceived at the time and throughout history. Her current research is focussed on the Spanish-born duchess of Florence and Siena, Eleonora di Toledo and her role in state formation. She is on the Academic Board of the Medici Archive Project. She has previously published in Renaissance Studies and has published two monographs and several book chapters in her field of interest. She has also published a bibliography on Eleonora di Toledo for Oxford University Press.

Select publications

Books

• Maria Salviati de’ Medici; Selected Letters,1514-1543, edited and translated Natalie R. Tomas (Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: Toronto series no. 90). New York & Toronto 2022. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/S/bo151927663.html

• The Medici Women: Gender and Power in Renaissance Florence. Aldershot Hampshire & Brookfield VT; Ashgate Publishing Co, in the ‘Women and Gender in the Early Modern World’ series, 2003, republished Routledge 2017, ebook). DOI: 10.4324/9781315238364

Journal articles

• ‘Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici and the “problem” of a female ruler in early sixteenth century Florence,’ Renaissance Studies, vol. 14, no.1 pp. 70-90, (2000). DOI: 1111/j.1477-4658.2000.tb00372.x

Book chapters

• 2016 “‘With his authority she used to manage much business’: The Career of Signora Maria Salviati and Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici”, in P.F. Howard & C. Hewlett (eds) Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F.W. Kent. (Turnhout: Brepols), pp. 133-148. DOI: 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.109702

• 2015 “Eleonora di Toledo, Regency and State Formation” in J.C. Brown & G. Benadusi (eds) Medici Women: Grand duchesses of Tuscany. (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies), pp. 58-89. 

• 2008 “Commemorating a Mortal Goddess: Maria Salviati de’ Medici and the Cultural Politics of Duke Cosimo I’, in Peter Sherlock and Megan Cassidy-Welch (eds) Practices of Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies) (Turnhout: Brepols), pp.261-278. DOI: 10.1484/M.LMEMS-EB.3.760
  
  
• 2006 ‘Did Women Have a Space?’ in Renaissance Florence: A Social History, edited by Roger Crum and John Paoletti, New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 311-328.

• 2005 ‘All in the Family’: Lucrezia and Maria Salviati and Pope Clement VII’ in S. Reiss & K. Gouwens (eds) The Pontificate of Clement VII: History, Politics, Culture in the ‘Catholic Christendom 1300-1700 series’, Aldershot Hampshire & Brookfield VT; Ashgate Publishing Co., pp.41-53. DOI: 10.4324/9781315237671

Bibliography

• 2017 (revised 9/2022). “Eleonora di Toledo”, in Oxford Bibliographies: Renaissance and Reformation. DOI: 10.1093/OBO/9780195399301-0370

Projects

• Creating the Medici Grand Duchy: Eleonora di Toledo, Gender and State Formation in Early Modern Italy. This project offers a new interpretation of the rise of the Medicean princely state in the mid-sixteenth century by showing the ways in which it was underpinned by Duke Cosimo I’s partnership and relationships with his wife, Eleonora of Toledo. It will exploit the rich surviving record of the Medici grand duchy, mainly through its correspondence to reveal power dynamics and a gendered mode of statecraft that have not previously been understood, and fundamentally to reorient and reappraise current historical understanding of the way statecraft was conducted in one of early modern Europe's leading princely courts.

• Eleonora@500 edited volume of essays with Bruce Edelstein (NYU Florence) and Alessio Assonitis (Medici Archive Project) (Brepols publisher) (in preparation).

Grants and scholarships

• 2020: Australasian Centre for Italian Studies (ACIS) Publication Grant Scheme ($2,000).
• 2010: Seeding grant - School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies, Monash University ($3,000).
• 2000: Monash University Faculty of Arts Small Research Grant ($8,000).
• 1995: Australian Centre for Italian Studies postgraduate travel scholarship ($6,000)
• 1993-1997: Monash University PhD Scholarship

Accolades

• 2021-present: Member, Academic Board, Medici Archive Project.
• 2017: reviewer by invitation of research proposal for Le Studium fellowship in France.
• 2016: Chair, ANZAMEMS George Yule Essay Prize Committee for 2017.

Service to the profession

• 1997-2023: Book reviews have appeared in key, peer-reviewed scholarly journals in my field: Parergon, Italian Studies, Isis, Journal of Religious History, Renaissance Quarterly, Gender & History and Sixteenth Century Journal.
• I have peer-reviewed journal articles for Journal of Religious History, Italian Studies and Parergon as well as several book manuscripts for Ashgate Publishing, Amsterdam University Press and Cambridge University Press.