Maria Clotilde Camboni

I am currently Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages at the University of Oxford and Academic Visitor at Somerville College.
I work on 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)" aims to provide the first historical reconstruction of the evolution of views on the medieval Italian vernacular literary tradition in Italy during the period that leads to the formation of an established canon of vernacular literary authors.
I started mainly as a medievalist. My first monograph was published in 2011, and comprises analyses concerning the circulation of knowledge and especially of vernacular cultural artefacts in Italy during the Middle Ages. I was then awarded the 2013-2015 “Marco Praloran” postdoctoral fellowship at the Franceschini Foundation (Florence) and Lausanne University to develop a research project whose main result was 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.