Notes on Contributors
Barbara Bombi
is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Kent. She studied at the Catholic University in Milan, where she completed her Ph.D. in 2000. In 2001 she was a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Rome. Between 2002 and 2004 she had a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Padua before moving to Oxford where she took up the post of Lyell Research Fellow in Latin Paleography at Corpus Christi College. In 2006 she moved to Canterbury after being appointed as a Lecturer in the School of History at the University of Kent. The author of numerous books and articles, her research interests focus on ecclesiastical and religious history in the High Middle Ages (1200–1450) and she specializes in the medieval papacy and canon law.
Elena Bonora
is Full Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Parma (Italy). Her research focuses above all on the religious crisis of the sixteenth century and on the Counter-Reformation Church. Her monographs include: Waiting for the Emperor: Italian Princes, the Pope and Charles V (2022); La Controriforma (2020, 9th ed.); 1564: La congiura contro il papa (2011); Giudicare i vescovi La definizione dei poteri nella Chiesa postridentina (2007). She is currently Principal Investigator of the National Research Project: The Nuncio’s Secret Archives: Papal Diplomacy and European Multi-denominational Societies Before the Thirty Years War.
Bruce Brasington
is Professor of History at West Texas A&M University. His main area of research is the medieval canon and civil law, with some explorations of their influence in the early-modern period. He has also published on American medievalism and on textual criticism/codicology. He is the author of Prefaces to Canon Law Books in Latin Christianity: Selected Translations, 500–1317, 2nd edition, with Robert Somerville (2020); Order in the Court: Medieval Procedural Treatises in Translation (2016); and Ways of Mercy: The Prologue of Ivo of Chartres (2004). He has also coedited a volume of essays with Kathleen Cushing: Bishops, Texts and the Use of Canon Law Around 1100: Essays in Honour of Martin Brett (2008).
Sandro Carocci
is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. He has published, among other works: Baroni di Roma: Dominazioni signorili e lignaggi aristocratici nel Duecento e nel primo Trecento (1993); Vassalli del papa: Potere pontificio, aristocrazie e città nello Stato della Chiesa (XII–XV sec.) (2010); Lordships of Southern Italy: Rural Societies, Aristocratic Powers and Monarchy in the 12th and 13th Centuries (2018).
Peter D. Clarke
is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Southampton (UK). He is an ecclesiastical historian specializing in the later medieval papacy and canon law. His publications include The Interdict in the Thirteenth Century: A Question of Collective Guilt (OUP: Oxford, 2007) and Supplications from England and Wales in the Registers of the Apostolic Penitentiary, 1410–1503 (edited with Patrick N.R. Zutshi), 3 volumes, Canterbury and York Society 103–105 (Boydell: Woodbridge, 2013–15). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and one of the Directors of the Stephan Kuttner Institute of Medieval Canon Law, and was co-editor of Studies in Church History for the Ecclesiastical History Society in 2007–2012. Since July 2024 he is President of ICMAC (Iuris Canonici Medii Aevi Consociatio = International Society of Medieval Canon Law).
Maria Teresa Fattori
received her Ph.D. at the University of Pisa. She is researcher at the University of Teramo (Netex – Networks and exchanges within the Congregations of the Roman Curia: a digital analysis of the early modern Church archives PRIN 2022 PNRR), and was formerly a researcher at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin as chair of Historical Theology. Her research interests cover the areas of the Cultural History of the Early Modern Papacy and Roman Curia, Cultural History of Politics and Institutions, and the History of Canon Law. Among her publications, she has edited the monographs Clemente VIII e il Sacro Collegio, 1592–1605 Meccanismi istituzionali e accentramento di governo [Päpste und Paspttum vol. 33] (Stuttgart: 2004); Benedetto XIV e Trento Tradurre il concilio nel Settecento [Päpste und Paspttum vol. 44] (Stuttgart: 2015); Provincial Councils, Rome and Political Powers in Polycentric Catholicism, 1517–1817 [Collectane Archivi Vaticani 129] (Città del Vaticano: 2025); with Paolo Prodi, Lettere di Benedetto XIV al marchese Paolo Magnani (1743–1748) [“Italia Sacra”] (Rome: 2011).
Massimo Carlo Giannini
received his Ph.D. in Historical Sciences at the School of Historical Studies of the University of the Republic of San Marino (1997). He has held scholarships at the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rom (July–December 1998) and at the National Research Council at the Universidad de Valladolid in Spain (January–August 1999). Since December 2020 he has been Full Professor of Modern History at the Faculty of Communication Sciences at the University of Teramo. He is also a member of the Accademia Ambrosiana – Classe di Studi Borromaici (Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan) and “Investigador de referencia” of the Instituto Universitario La Corte en Europa – Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain). His publications include the monographs: L’oro e la tiara: La costruzione dello spazio fiscale italiano della Santa Sede (1560–1620) (2003), and I Domenicani (2016).
Anthony John Lappin
is Lektor i Spanska at the Institution för Romanska och Klassiska Studier, Stockholms Universitet, and was previously Research Professor and Professor of Spanish at Maynooth University and Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester. He has published, most recently, a multi-volume edition of texts associated with the first translation of the Qur’an, Alchoran latinus, vols. I–IV (Rome, Aracne: 2012–23), and various studies of Spanish history and poetics (such as The Medieval Cult of St Dominic of Silos [Leeds: 2002] and Gonzalo de Berceo: The Poet and His Verses [London: 2008]). He is currently working on an edition of Hugh of St Cher’s Speculum ecclesie.
Rita Lizzi Testa
studied in Florence, London (King’s College) and Princeton (The Institute for Advanced Study). She taught at the University of Turin and is now Professor of Roman History at the University of Perugia, Italy, and since November 2023 she has been a member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. She is an expert on relations between the Roman Empire and the Church and is in charge of national and international projects on ancient institutions and their transformation in late antiquity. She has published numerous articles on Christianization and conversion in the Roman Empire and is author of several books on the governance of late antique towns and the institutional changes from Constantine to Theodoric the Great: Senatori, popolo, papi: Il governo di Roma al tempo dei Valentiniani (2004); Christian Emperors and Roman Elites in Late Antiquity (2022); and Un Occidente rivolto a Est (455–554 d. C.) (2024). She is editor and coeditor of many volumes on the conflict and dialogue among pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire, such as Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire: The Breaking of a Dialogue (IVth–VIth Century A.D.) (2011) (with Peter Brown); Pagans and Christians in Late Antique Rome: Conflict, Competition, and Coexistence in the Fourth Century (2016) (with Michele Renee Salzman and Marianne Saghy), and on other different topics, such as The Strange Death of Pagan Rome (2013); Late Antiquity in Contemporary debate (2017); The Collectio Avellana and Its Revivals (with Giulia Marconi) (2019); The Past as Present (with Giovanni Alberto Cecconi and Arnaldo Marcone) (2019); and The Collectio Avellana and the Development of Notarial Practices in Late Antiquity (with G. Marconi & A. Giomma).
Rosamond McKitterick
is Professor Emerita of Medieval History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College. Her particular interest in the history of early medieval Europe embraces the regions dominated by the Franks, the history of Rome and the popes in late antiquity and the early middle ages, and early medieval books and scripts. She was awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken International Prize in History in 2010 and is a corresponding member of the Medieval Academy of America, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Monumenta Germaniae Historica and the Société Nationale des Antiquaires de France. Her recent books include Rome and the Invention of the Papacy: The Liber pontificalis (2020), the co-authored translation of the Codex epistolaris carolinus: Letters from the Popes to the Frankish Rulers, 739–791 (2021), and co-edited volumes on medieval Rome, Rome Across time and Space: Cultural Transmission and the Exchange of Ideas, c. 500–1400 (2011) and Old Saint Peter’s, Rome (2013).
Dominic Moreau
is Associate Professor (Maître de conférences) in Late Antiquity at the University of Lille and a permanent member of the HALMA-UMR 8164 research center in France. A Doctor of Paris-Sorbonne University, with a dissertation on the temporal aspects of Roman Church in the fifth and sixth centuries AD, he is interested in various subjects pertaining to relations between the Later Roman Empire and Christianity, including civil and ecclesiastical institutions as well as legal sources and canonical collections, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. Since 2018, he has co-directed the International Archaeological Mission at Zaldapa (Bulgaria) and directs the DANUBIUS Project on Christianisation of the Lower Danube. Furthermore, he coordinates the HAEMUS International Research Network on archaeology and history of the Balkans in late antiquity since its foundation in 2021. The author and editor of many studies, his most recent book is: La basilique Saint-Irénée de Sirmium et sa nécropole, co-edited with Ivana Popović, Miloje Vasić, and Jean Guyon, published in 2022.
Bronwen Neil
is Professor of Ancient History in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University, Sydney. Until 2016, she was the Burke Associate Professor of Ecclesiastical Latin at Australian Catholic University. Her research focuses on Western and Eastern Roman cultural history from the fourth to the tenth centuries, with an emphasis on East-West church relations, gender, and hagiography. She is the author of Dreams and Divination from Byzantium to Baghdad (400–1000 CE) (2021); Leo the Great, The Early Church Fathers (2009); and Seventh-century Popes and Martyrs: The Political Hagiography of Anastasius Bibliothecarius (2006). With Pauline Allen, she has published two recent books on epistolography: Conflict and Negotiation in the Early Church (2020), and Greek and Roman Letters in Late Antiquity: The Christianisation of a Literary Form (2020).
Miles Pattenden
is Programme Director at the Europaeum, Oxford, and a Researcher at Deakin University in Melbourne. He works on the history of the papacy and the Catholic Church, and his books include Pius IV and the Fall of the Carafa (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Electing the Pope in Early Modern Italy, 1450–1700 (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Giovanni Pizzorusso
is Associate Professor in the Department of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences of the University “G. d’Annunzio” of Chieti-Pescara where he has taught since 2003. He worked at the Italian Historical Institute for the Modern and Contemporary Age, Rome (1996–1999) and at the Central Council for Historical Studies, Rome (1999–2002). His most recent studies focus on Catholic missions and the circulation of knowledge in the age of early globalization, with particular attention to the Roman Orientalism of the seventeenth century linked to the Congregation of Propaganda Fide. He has published numerous essays and volumes in Italy and abroad, held and organized invited seminars in research centers in various countries, participating in many international research projects. Among his recent publications are Governare le missioni, conoscere il mondo nel XVII secolo: La Congregazione pontificia de Propaganda Fide (2018): Propaganda Fide I: La Congregazione pontificia e la giurisdizione sulle missioni (2022), and the edited volume (with Antal Molnar and Matteo Sanfilippo) Chiese e nationes a Roma: Dalla Scandinavia ai Balcani (secoli XV–XVIII) (2017).
Donald S. Prudlo
holds the Warren Chair of Catholic Studies at the University of Tulsa. Before 2019 he was Professor of History at Jacksonville State University. His research focus is on medieval religious history and thought, saints and sainthood, and on the Dominican order. He is the author of Thomas Aquinas: An Historical, Theological, and Environmental Portrait (2020), Certain Sainthood (2015), and The Martyred Inquisitor (2009), in addition to many editions, translations, chapters, and articles.
Kirsi Salonen
is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Bergen, Norway. She has been working for decades with source materials in the Vatican and specializes in papal administration, especially the Apostolic Penitentiary and the Sacra Romana Rota. Her major publications include The Penitentiary as a Well of Grace in the Late Middle Ages (2001), A Sip from the “Well of Grace”: Medieval Texts from the Apostolic Penitentiary (2009, with Ludwig Schmugge), Entering Clerical Career at the Roman Curia, 1458–1471 (2012, with Jussi Hanska) and Papal Justice in the Late Middle Ages: The Sacra Romana Rota (2016).
Cesare Santus
Ph.D. Scuola Normale Superiore-EPHE Paris, 2015, is Assistant Professor at the University of Trieste. He recently authored Trasgressioni necessarie: Communicatio in sacris, coesistenza e conflitti tra le comunità cristiane orientali (2019). He is the author of several articles on the Muslim and Eastern Christian presence in early modern Italy, on which he has published a second book, Il “turco” a Livorno: Incontri con l’islam nella Toscana del Seicento (2019). With Aurélien Girard, Vassa Kontouma, and Karène Sanchez Sanchez he is the editor of a collection of B. Heyberger’s essays on Middle Eastern and European Christianity, 16th–20th Century: Connected Histories (EUP, forthcoming). He is currently pursuing an ongoing research on the role of the Roman Inquisition with respect to the problems raised by Catholic missions in the East.
Danica Summerlin
is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Sheffield. Her work focuses on the medieval church and on medieval councils, and especially where the two overlap, and she takes a deep interest in the wonderfully convoluted field of knowledge that is medieval canon law. She is the author if The Canons of the Third Lateran Council of 1179, Their Origins and Reception (2019).