Luca Zenobi
Title
Dr
Institution
University of Edinburgh
Current Research
I am a historian of Italy, Europe and the Mediterranean world between 1300 and 1600.
Having read history and trained as an archivist in Milan, I moved to Oxford for my PhD and then to Cambridge, where I was a research fellow at Trinity College and an affiliated lecturer at the Faculty of History. I joined the University of Edinburgh in 2023 as a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow.
I like to think of my work as a geography of the past. I am interested in how people articulated their presence in the landscape, moved and communicated across distances, and ultimately inscribed their experiences in both texts and objects.
I have written articles and book chapters on the process of community- and territory-formation, the spatial organisation of factions and family militias, and the experience of migration, exile and displacement.
Recent projects include a volume on early modern disinformation, which was developed in collaboration with literary scholars, as well as essays on topics such as medieval marriage networks and the comparative history of rivers and waterways.
My first single-authored monograph, Borders and the Politics of Space in Late Medieval Italy, was published in 2023. The book explores how borders were understood, made, and encountered at the end of the Middle Ages, and what they can tell us about the spatial fabric of society at the threshold of modernity.
Having read history and trained as an archivist in Milan, I moved to Oxford for my PhD and then to Cambridge, where I was a research fellow at Trinity College and an affiliated lecturer at the Faculty of History. I joined the University of Edinburgh in 2023 as a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow.
I like to think of my work as a geography of the past. I am interested in how people articulated their presence in the landscape, moved and communicated across distances, and ultimately inscribed their experiences in both texts and objects.
I have written articles and book chapters on the process of community- and territory-formation, the spatial organisation of factions and family militias, and the experience of migration, exile and displacement.
Recent projects include a volume on early modern disinformation, which was developed in collaboration with literary scholars, as well as essays on topics such as medieval marriage networks and the comparative history of rivers and waterways.
My first single-authored monograph, Borders and the Politics of Space in Late Medieval Italy, was published in 2023. The book explores how borders were understood, made, and encountered at the end of the Middle Ages, and what they can tell us about the spatial fabric of society at the threshold of modernity.
Recent Publications
Urban Life in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, semester-long lesson plans for Bloomsbury Medieval Studies (online 2023)
Borders and the Politics of Space in Late Medieval Italy: Milan, Venice, and their Territories (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2023)
"Beyond the State: Community and Territory-Making in Late Medieval Italy," in Constructing and Representing Territory in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by M. Damen and K. Overlaet (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2022): 53-79
Beyond Truth: Fiction and Disinformation in Early Modern Europe, ed. with E. Claussen, Past & Present, 257/16 (2022), supplement
Cities in Motion: Mobility and Urban Space in Early Modern Europe, ed. with P. Gonzalez Martin and R. Salzberg, Journal of Early Modern History, 25/1-2 (2021), special issue
"Venice's Terraferma Expansion and the Negotiation of Territories in Late Medieval Italy," Ateneo Veneto, 18/2 (2019): 187-218
Borders and the Politics of Space in Late Medieval Italy: Milan, Venice, and their Territories (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2023)
"Beyond the State: Community and Territory-Making in Late Medieval Italy," in Constructing and Representing Territory in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by M. Damen and K. Overlaet (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2022): 53-79
Beyond Truth: Fiction and Disinformation in Early Modern Europe, ed. with E. Claussen, Past & Present, 257/16 (2022), supplement
Cities in Motion: Mobility and Urban Space in Early Modern Europe, ed. with P. Gonzalez Martin and R. Salzberg, Journal of Early Modern History, 25/1-2 (2021), special issue
"Venice's Terraferma Expansion and the Negotiation of Territories in Late Medieval Italy," Ateneo Veneto, 18/2 (2019): 187-218