Matteo Pace

Professor Pace is a medievalist specializing in Italian cultures of the 13th and 14th centuries. In his research, he focuses on how Medieval vernacular poetry shaped the reception of Ancient medical thought (especially Aristotle and Galen) through the uses of poetical images centered around the body. He is also interested in how the theories on body and soul informed the ways in which Medieval poetry articulated its tropes, and vice versa.

He just completed a doctoral dissertation titled “Of Poets and Physicians: Medical and Scientific Thought from the Sicilian School to Dante, 1230-1300,” in which he explores the varied networks of Medieval cultures through the history of Italian literature and the cultural reception of ancient medicine, with a focus on sense-perception, memory, physiology of body and soul, bodily determinism and free will.

He is currently reworking his dissertation into different publications on medicine in the Italian lyric tradition, with the aim of turning his research into a book on the subject. His most recent works are on the Aristotelian physiology of perception and memory in the poetry of Giacomo da Lentini, on medical phenomenology of love and Avicennian physics in Guido Guinizzelli, on Dante’s reception of ethics between philosophical and vernacular traditions, and on Taddeo Alderotti’s vernacular translation of an abridged version of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. He is also part of Digital Dante at Columbia University, an interdisciplinary digital project on Dante’s work and reception.

At Connecticut College, he will be teaching courses in Italian language and culture, and on Medieval literatures in their intellectual contexts.

More information about Professor Pace’s work can be found on his Academia.edu profile and on the Italian studies department website.