Dr. Marina Montesano

Marina Montesano works on the history of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, especially in the fields of the circulation of culture, mobility between West and East, gender history, magic and witchcraft.

She is a fellow of Villa I Tatti - The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance and between 2018 and 2022 was a member of the scientific committee of the International Society for Cultural History (ISCH). The book she edited entitled Folklore, Magic, and Witchcraft: Cultural Exchanges from the Twelfth to Eighteenth Century (London, Routledge, 2022) received the Katharine Briggs Award of the Folklore Society.

She has taken part in numerous conferences in Italy and abroad (Canada, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Spain, United States, Switzerland, Hungary). In addition to her academic activities, she has presented lectures at the Italian Cultural Institutes in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Cairo, Egypt; Hamburg, Germany; Istanbul, Turkey.

Her monographs include Classical Culture and Witchcraft in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (London, Palgrave/MacMillan, 2018) on the theme of the influence of classical culture in the creation of the image of the witch. Her most recent monograph, currently in press, will be published by Routledge under the title Cross-dressing in the Middle Ages. Cross-dressing is a thought-provoking practice in a world that, in theory, adheres to neat distinctions of the functions and attires of males and females in society; this volume demonstrates that only a long-term analysis can fully account for the phenomenon in its various facets. If dress is a gender marker, the argument that it also marks many other conditions beyond the man–woman binary cannot be ignored. There is a dress for the cleric and one for the layman; there is the dress of the rich and that of the poor. In some cases, these other binary distinctions are intertwined with that of sex and gender, and this intersectional perspective is developed through a wide range of sources read with philological rigour, encompassing the hagiographies of the first centuries, the most famous case of Joan of Arc, numerous chivalrous novels, and the overlooked accounts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.