Maria Clotilde Camboni

I am currently an Honorary Research Fellow at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages, University of Oxford. Previously, I held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship at the same faculty and was an Academic Visitor at Somerville College.

My research explores the Renaissance reception of the medieval Italian vernacular tradition. My Marie Skłodowska-Curie project, 'Between rediscovery and recreation: Renaissance Accounts of Medieval Italian Vernacular Literary Tradition (1476–1530)', aimed to provide the first historical reconstruction of evolving views on the medieval Italian vernacular literary tradition in Italy during the period leading to the formation of an established canon of vernacular literary authors. This work developed from an earlier project, 'Middle Ages in Renaissance', funded by a Le Studium–Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant at the Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance in Tours.

I began my career primarily as a medievalist. My first monograph (2011) examined the circulation of knowledge and vernacular cultural artefacts in medieval Italy. I then held the 2013–15 “Marco Praloran” postdoctoral fellowship at the Franceschini Foundation in Florence and at the University of Lausanne, where I developed a project that resulted in my second monograph (2017), on the conception of poetic forms in Italy. The book assesses how during an extensive chronologic arc (1230-1400) this conception evolved, and explores how it relates to the public’s perception of the forms. The work combines study and comparison between the Italian tradition and the literary traditions of langue d'oc and d'oïl, and applies research in cognitive psychology, material philology, and available knowledge about medieval music and dance.