Jennifer Evans is a senior lecturer in History within the School of Creative Arts. Her research is focused on the body, medicine and gender and covers the period 1550-1750. To date her research has examined reproductive health, infertility, and miscarriage. She completed her PhD at the University of Exeter in 2011 and taught at the same university for two years before joining the University of Hertfordshire. She has written two monographs Aphrodisiacs, Fertility and Medicine in early modern England was published by Boydell & Brewer in October 2014, and Men's Sexual Health in Early Modern England published by Amsterdam University Press in November 2023. She is currently working on a project that explores miscarriage and pregnancy loss in the early modern period; several articles from this research have been published that explore men's roles in miscarriage, attempts to prevent miscarriage, and the physical toll that miscarriage took on women's bodies.

From 2017-2018 she served as the  Social History Society's Honorary Secretary. From 2019-2022 she acted as the Society's Treasurer.

She currently directs the Perceptions of Pregnancy researchers' network with Leanne Calvert, Sarah Fox and Chelsea Phillips. The research network brings together scholars in a range of fields to examine all aspects of fertility, pregnancy, childbirth and early parenthood and was found by Evans and Ciara Meehan. The network has currently published two collections, a special edition of Women's History in the summer of 2016 and an edited collection Perceptions of Pregnancy from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Palgrave, 2017). The network hosted its second conference in September 2021. 

She is the founding editor of the Early Modern Medicine blog, which features posts by scholars in a range of fields exploring medine and the body in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 

In 2017 she also published a book co-authored with Sara Read (Univesity of Loughborough) Maladies and Medicine: Exploring Health and Healing 1540-1740 (Pen and Sword books)

From 2022 -2023 she was working on an AHRC Early Stage Impact Accelerator Award Project 'Foraging for Early Modern Medicines 1600-1750'. Throughout the early modern period recipes for ‘Kitchen physick’, medicinal remedies produced in the home, were recorded in manuscript collections. Remedies treated everyday ailments like headaches and more serious conditions like gout. Historians have discussed whether ingredients for these medicines were sought in the hedgerow or were purchased from an apothecary. This project will bring to life the skills required of men and in the seventeenth century to produce remedies in their kitchens. Dr Jennifer Evans and expert forager and distiller George Fredenham, who ran ‘The Foragers’ restaurant in St. Albans for ten years, will together create foraging walks that seek out ingredients commonly used by seventeenth-century men and women, including common mallows, elderflowers, and germander. These walking tour workshops will develop participants’ understanding of the accessibility, complexities, and dangers of finding suitable ingredients in the English countryside. The walks will vividly evoke the depth of seventeenth-century people’s everyday botanical and medical knowledge and will reveal how these same plants and substances are now being rediscovered and used in contemporary food and drink. The talks will present a sensory and embodied knowledge of medicine production. The walks, for example, will draw on participants’ sense of touch and smell to identify and understand ingredients. 

• Early modern history

• The history of the body

• The history of sexuality

• Gender history

• Women's history

• History of medicine

Completed Postgraduate supervison:

PhD Students:

Stephanie Allen, 'Deceitful Bodies: Ideas, Performance and the Physicality of Bodily Fraud, 1540 - 1750'

Fiona Mantle, 'Medical Self-Help During the First Half of the Twentieth Century: a Microhistory of a  Rural Community'

Megan Webber, '‘London Charity Beneficiaries, c. 1800-1834: Questions of Agency’.

MA by research Students:

Natalie Walker, 'The Serpent and the Rainbow: Emblems and Ambitions in the ‘Rainbow’ Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I'.

Alexandra Brown, 'Fidelity and the concept of male faithfulness in Georgian Relationships, 1714-1830'.

Current Postgraduate supervision:

Kiran Seera, 'Domestic Disorder: Crime, Kinship, and Space in Bedfordshire, c. 1650-1790'

• social and medical history
• history of the body

• level 4: Faith, Magic and Medicine, 1500-1800
• level 5: Maladies and Medicine in early modern Europe
• level 6: Bodies and Sexualities in the early modern era

Television

Appearance in 'Inside Versailles', broadcast on BBC 2 (May 2017)

Appearance in ‘Heston’s Recipe for Romance’, broadcast on Channel 4 (February 2015).

Radio

BBC Radio Four, ‘The Food Programme: Love on a Plate’ (11 February 2024 – longer version repeated 12 February 2024 and available on BBC Sounds) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001w6yj

Guest on ‘All About Eve: Stories of the Fall; Pregancy and Aphrodisiacs’, Free Thinking, BBC Radio 3 (December 2017).

North Manchester Radio, Hannah's Bookcase. Broadcast 24 September 2017.

‘Spanish Fly, Chemsex and Female Viagra: why drugs and sex don’t always mix’, Geoff Turner ‘On Drugs’ podcast, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (July 2017)

Soho Radio, Science Mixtape. Broadcast 15 October 2016.

BBC World Service programme The Food Chain talking about ‘Fertile Foods’. Broadcast on Saturday 6 August 2016.

I have been interviewed on the Mark Forrest Show for BBC Local Radio and on BBC Radio Wiltshire.

Podcasts

‘New Books Network’ podcast, (2 March 2024) Available on all platforms

‘Dirty, Sexy History’ Podcast with Jessica Cale (January 2023)

‘Call me Curious’, ‘Can Aphrodisiacs Really Turn you On’, Podcast by Wondery for (March 2022). 

In conversation with Reddit/AskHistorians. Sara Read and I talk about early modern medicine and women’s health issues.

Print Media

‘A Taste for Strange Meats and Husbands’ buttocks’, BBC History Magazine (Christmas 2020). 

‘Snuffs and Sneezes Cure Diseases’, History Today (January 2019). 

‘Aegrescit Medendo? Cure worse than disease’, interview in Hertfordshire Life Magazine (January 2017).

‘Coughs & Sneezes & Dead Diseases’, iNews (August 2017). Syndicated in the Yorkshire Post 'Horrid Coughs and Sneezes and Dead Diseases' (August 2017).

‘Goats Dung, Mummified Flesh and Vomiting’, Shakespeare Magazine (July 2017).

'Shameful Secrets, men’s sexual health’, History Today (January 2016).

‘When Beans were the Food of Lust’, BBC History Magazine (April 2014).

Interviewed for ‘Fertility Towns: Is there ever something in the water?’, BBC Magazine.

Invited Talks

Royal College of Physicians Edinburgh, ‘Cause for Complaint: Men’s Sexual Health in Early Modern England’ (August 2020) 

Oxford Brookes University ‘Aphrodisiacs and Love Potions’, part of the Beyond Desire: Gender and Power in Love for the Thinking Human festival (February 2020) 

Tamworth Literary Festival, Aethelfest 2018, ‘Make her a Bath of Seawater: The Medical Compendium of a Medieval Medical Woman’, 4 August 2018.

Pleasant Vices Panel Discussion at the British Museum, 25 May 2018.

Delivered the Hitchin Historical Society annual Miss Lewis Lecture, 13 July 2016

Speaker at the Chalke Valley Schools History Festival, 28 June 2016

Authors at Google talk on ‘Aphrodisiacs, Fertility and Medicine in early modern England’ delivered on the 4 August 2015. Available on Youtube.