Marco Gentile
I was born and raised in Milan, Italy. After graduating in Medieval History from the State University of Milan, I was awarded a PhD in Historical Studies from the University of Trent in 2003. In 2005 I was appointed Dombrowski Fellow in History at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. From 2006 to 2010 I have been a Research Fellow in History at the State University of Milan. I have been a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford during Michaelmas and Hilary Terms, academic year 2016/17. Since December 2010 I have been teaching at the University of Parma, where at present I am associate professor of Medieval History, and since January 2020 Head of the BA in Humanities (Lettere). I am a member of the editorial boards of "Società e storia", of "Medievalismo. Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Estudios Medievales" and of "Lombardia nel Rinascimento".
Supervisors: Giorgio Chittolini (MA, State University of Milan 1999), Letizia Arcangeli (MA, Gian Maria Varanini (PhD, and State University of Trent 2003)
Phone: +39 0521032248
Address: Dipartimento di Discipline Umanistiche, Sociali e delle Imprese Culturali
Università di Parma
Strada Massimo D'Azeglio, 85
43125 Parma
Italy
http://www.unipr.it/ugov/person/101444
Supervisors: Giorgio Chittolini (MA, State University of Milan 1999), Letizia Arcangeli (MA, Gian Maria Varanini (PhD, and State University of Trent 2003)
Phone: +39 0521032248
Address: Dipartimento di Discipline Umanistiche, Sociali e delle Imprese Culturali
Università di Parma
Strada Massimo D'Azeglio, 85
43125 Parma
Italy
http://www.unipr.it/ugov/person/101444
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Books by Marco Gentile
The book represents the first major outcome of the research carried out within the PRIN2020 project "NOMINA. Forenames in Late Medieval Italy: a new approach to social and political history". The essays collected here examine the onomastic landscape of the later Middle Ages, assessing its continuities and discontinuities in relation to the early medieval centuries, primarily in light of local identities and political allegiances.
This perspective makes it possible to reassess certain well-known aspects of change — most notably the Christianisation of the onomastic repertoire, but also the use of names drawn from the natural world, the popularity of names derived from places of origin, and the influence of seigneurial naming practices — by considering the personal name as an expression of belonging and of integration within social spaces.
It thus offers an analytical key that opens up new areas within Italian scholarship, integrating established studies on onomastic structures with quantitative approaches to related repertoires, and one that the project will continue to explore.
La ricostruzione analitica della società politica parmense del XV secolo consente di procedere oltre la tradizionale visione storiografica dei partiti tardomedievali come portatori di insensata violenza, evidenziando come il disordine abbia le sue regole; e permette al tempo stesso di mettere in discussione il concetto di fazione come aggregato informale e fluido trasmessa agli storici del tardo medioevo e della prima età moderna dall’antropologia e dalla sociologia post-strutturaliste.
L’indagine mette a fuoco una pluralità di forme e di livelli d’azione dei gruppi politicizzati: le quattro «squadre», partiti cittadini dotati di un alto profilo istituzionale e stabilmente legati ai potenti casati signorili del contado; le «conventicole e sette», reticoli informali e lobbies che si coagulano intorno ad obiettivi aperti e chiusi nell’ombra dei giochi cortigiani e sulla grande scena del sistema degli stati italiani; le vecchie ma sempre incombenti metafazioni dei guelfi e dei ghibellini, ancora disponibili in pieno Quattrocento per chi sappia sfruttarne a fini politici il grande potenziale simbolico e l’intatta capacità di ridestare solidarietà antiche e profonde.
Articles by Marco Gentile
of political crisis, also show that traditional practices such as planting trees and collecting leafy branches at the beginning of May were equally common in town and country. The analysis of the rich materials provided by the Carteggio sforzesco brings to surface practices which we get to know because the context was considered politically or criminally relevant by the actors or by the public authority: which confirms once more the heuristic value of conflict, as well as the need to nuance our understanding of the urban and rural environment as rigidly separated cultural contexts, and to rethink and complicate the very concept of popular culture.
and political theorists who conceded the legitimacy of factional division as a means to good government. References to the natural belonging to a faction, which was never completely independent from individual free will, are particularly abundant in Lombardy under the Visconti
and the Sforza. Built around a stock of examples drawn from chronicles, theoretical treatises and pragmatic political texts, the essay charts a history of this concept, later dismissed during the sixteenth century, with the fall of the regional state and its inclusion in broader political
structures.