Personale docente

My research treats money and its most direct manifestation, coinage, as a product of human activity, thus challenging a conceptualisation of money as a medium detached from the people and institutions that used it. By combining material evidence (2019) with a wide range of written sources – from public and fiscal records, to notarial registers, chronicles, and private correspondence – my articles and book chapters have explored the complexities of money’s interlinked economic (2017), cultural (2016, 2020), and political (2018) meanings. My forthcoming monograph, The Florin of Florence. The Politics and Culture of Money in the Middle Ages, will offer a significant revision of the existing consensus around the most used late medieval currency, the Florentine gold florin, showing that it was not employed exclusively for long-distance trade, but that it simultaneously penetrated networks of power between the Florentine merchants, the Angevin Crown, and the Papacy, thus becoming a political agent of change in its own right, one that enabled military victories and in turn enhanced the status of the money operators. This work will also enrich current interpretations of the Commercial Revolution (1000-1300) by presenting it as an historical process with strong political and social dimensions, thus providing a framework for the integrated study of material culture and economic practices. I am co-editor of the series The Italian Coins in the British Museum, and I coordinate or collaborate on various projects with Princeton University, The British Museum, the Ashmolean Museum, and the University of Milan.