Michele Campopiano

Profile

Biography

Michele Campopiano grew up in Caserta, Italy. He studied History at the University of Pisa and at the Scuola Normale of Pisa under the supervision of Marco Tangheroni and Armando Petrucci. Part of his studies was spent in Paris at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes. For his PhD thesis at the Scuola Normale he worked on the Liber Guidonis compositus de variis historiis, a 12th-century compilation of geographical and historical texts, and provided a critical edition of its unpublished sections. After completion of his PhD, he worked for the Societa Internazionale per lo Studio del Medio Evo Latino (International Society for the Study of Medieval Latin Culture-SISMEL, Florence), where he reworked his PhD dissertation into a book, published with the Italian Edizione Nazionale dei Testi Mediolatini (National Edition of Medieval Latin Texts). This work led to many other research interests, including editing Medieval Latin texts, medieval historiography and geography, culture, and society of High and Late Medieval Italy, medieval science and ideas of nature and magic as well as relationships between Europe and the Middle East in the Middle Ages. He has worked for the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands (Department of History and Art History).  He was then appointed as Lecturer in Medieval Latin Literature at the University of York, and thereafter Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in 2014. He received the qualification for the functions of Full Professor in two academic fields (Medieval History and Medieval Latin and Romance Philologies and Literatures) by the Italian Ministry of University and Research, respectively in 2021 and 2020.

Research

Overview

Michele Campopiano’s research interests include historiography and representation of space in the Middle Ages, poetry, memory and historiography in medieval and Renaissance culture, Franciscan cultural traditions, cultural, economic and political relationships between Europe and the Middle East in the Middle Ages, medieval science and ideas of nature and magic and culture and society of  Italy (5th-16th centuries). Further research interests include historiography and political thought in the 19th and 20th centuries. He participated in various international projects, such as La création d'un mythe d'Alexandre le Grand dans les littératures européennes (XIe siècle - début XVIe siècle).

Michele Campopiano is currently completing two critical editions: an anonymous 14th-century description of the Holy Land (in Latin) and an anonymous Italian poem on Alexander the Great (16th century). He recently received an Alexander-von-Humboldt Fellowship for experienced scholars to investigate the relationship between cities and water management in the Po and Rhine Valley in the late Middle Ages, and he also published extensively in this area of studies. 

Publications

Michele Campopiano is the author of more than sixty publications, including books, articles, book chapters and reviews. He has published on Medieval Latin Literature and Medieval Latin Philology, on Italian Literature in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, as well as on the cultural, social, political and economic history of Western Europe and the Middle East from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period. He also published on Italian historiography and philosophy between the 19th and 20th century, as shown by his study and edition of Carlo Cattaneo’s La città considerata come principio ideale delle istorie italiane, which he is currently translating into English. His monograph Writing the Holy Land. The Franciscans of Mount Zion and the Construction of a Cultural Memory, 1300–1550 (Palgrave Macmillan 2020) received the 2021 San Francesco Prize from the Pontificia Università Antonianum. A list of his publications can be found on the York Research Database.