Research

My research deals with the interpretation, use, and manipulation of the past in the politics and culture of later medieval Europe.

I am particularly interested in the cities of medieval Italy, in questions of urban culture, civic identity, and the representation of the past (see cartoon at right). I have also recently become interested in how landscape and space relate to these issues. While most of my recent research has been on the cities of Rome and Genoa, I have also worked on Bergamo, Florence, Lucca, Padua, Pisa, Pistoia, Viterbo, and other cities.

TO maps, Florence, Bib. Riccardiana 1774

Compass rose, Paris, BnF Arsenal MS 8536

I am currently involved in the collaborative La Sfera Project, a multi-faceted study of Gregorio Dati's early-15th-century geographical treatise La sfera (The World); my main interests involve a study of the manuscript tradition and spatial analysis of the places mentioned in Dati's treatise.

I am interested generally in medieval urban life, the history of urban development, medieval cultural and intellectual history, classical Roman history, classical and medieval Latin (especially the transmission of classical texts in later centuries—for example, my note on the two Plinys below), palaeography and codicology (the study of medieval manuscripts and their writing), book history, medieval architecture and technology, and reception history generally (that is, the later history or "afterlife" of a famous person or idea).

My first book, Urban Legends: Civic Identity and the Classical Past in Northern Italy, 1250–1350 (Penn State University Press, 2011), is a study of classical foundation legends in medieval Italian cities. Communes and their ruling elites commonly used legends derived from the classical tradition as political and cultural propaganda: "Our city was founded before yours, by a more famous person than your founder; therefore we're better than you." Thus Padua had Antenor; Genoa (Ianua) had Janus; Siena had Senius and his brother Aschius; and Perugia had Eulistes—all of whom "improved" on Rome's Romulus and Remus in some way.

My second monograph (in progress) is tentatively titled SPQR: The Branding of Rome. This is a study of the later fortunes of the Roman SPQR acronym, which was revived in medieval Rome as the civic logo or coat of arms. In this fashion SPQR persisted through the rule of the medieval commune, the Renaissance popes, the new government of Risorgimento Italy, and Mussolini's Fascism—and is still today the logo of the Comune di Roma. (See, for example, my Pinterest boards of SPQRs and SPQXs). My initial article on this topic, "Whose SPQR? Sovereignty and Semiotics in Medieval Rome," appeared in Speculum in 2009.

Continuing my interest in urban culture and its relationship to its past, I recently translated Jacopo da Varagine's History of Genoa (Manchester Medieval Sources 2019); Jacopo was archbishop of Genoa in the late thirteenth century (ca. 1292–8), and is best known for the bestselling Golden Legend. But Jacopo was more than a hagiographer, and his chronicle of Genoa is an important witness to the urban life of a commune at the peak of its medieval glory. Besides focusing on Genoa, an important but often neglected city, my translation seeks to expand the sources for medieval Italy available in English translation, most of which deal exclusively with Florence and Venice. Click here for a few excerpts from my translation of the Chronicle.

Linked to my work on Jacopo, I recently edited a major Companion to Medieval Genoa (Brill 2018), that introduces undergraduates and non-specialists to the medieval history of Genoa. My work on Genoa has therefore expanded into an exploration of how topography and landscape interact with the past to shape identity narratives. This has enabled me to combine traditional skills such as palaeography, medieval Latin, and hagiography with new digital technologies such as GIS analysis.

Mansionario on the Two Plinys

For a course on Renaissance Italy, I recently translated a humanist treatise—the Short Note on the Two Plinys of Verona, or Adnotatio de duobus Pliniae by Giovanni Mansionario (also known as Giovanni de Matociis), a canon of the cathedral chapter in Verona in the first decades of the fourteenth century. Until then, it had generally been believed that all classical works attributed to "Pliny" were by the same person—both the Natural History of Pliny the Elder (AD ca. 23–79) and the letters of his nephew Pliny the Younger (AD ca. 61–113). Giovanni Mansionario was the first to distinguish these two and explain their true relationship. A PDF of my translation is available here: I am happy to have it circulate freely as long as it maintains my credit line and email address.

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