David Napolitano

I am an Assistant Professor in Medieval History at Utrecht University (The Netherlands).

In 2005 I decided to realize my childhood dream, namely studying Italian literature and history, after having practiced law for twelve years as corporate counsel of Belgium's largest bank (KBC Bank) and as a partner at Belgium's largest independent law firm (Eubelius).

During a Bachelor in Italian Language and Culture Studies (in combination with an Honours Minor and a Minor in Medieval Studies) at Utrecht University (2005-2008), I came into contact with Li Livres dou Tresor (1260-1266/7). This medieval treasure trove offered me an exciting peek into the intellectual horizons of one of the central figures of thirteenth-century Florence, Brunetto Latini.

In 2010 I completed a two-years Research Master in Medieval Studies at Utrecht University. This master programme included a year-long stay as an exchange student at the Faculty of History, University of California, Los Angeles.  For my research master thesis I studied the composition and reception of the Tresor on the Italian peninsula in order to trace the variation and repositioning of this political encyclopedia in different socio-political contexts. The thesis was awarded the Ted Meijer award by the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (2011).

After a traineeship at the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands (2010-2011) I enrolled in a PhD in history at the University of Cambridge (Trinity Hall, 2011-2014), where I wrote my PhD thesis under the supervision of Prof. Dr David Abulafia. For this PhD project I concentrated on the final part of the Tresor, dealing with Italian city government, and, instead of looking at its reception, I opted to study this text in relation to its predecessors, a corpus of thirteenth-century political advice books targeted at the podestà, the city magistrate, and his retinue (Oculus pastoralis (1220s), Giovanni da Viterbo's De regimine civitatum (1234?), and Orfino da Lodi's De regimine et sapientia potestatis (c.1245)). More precisely, I focused on the gradual design of a professional profile and code of conduct for the podestà in these works.

Moving beyond Italy's borders (during a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Cambridge, 2015-2018) and building upon my parallel background in law, literature studies and history, my academic interest has now broadened to the transnational study of a multilingual corpus of normative treatises on city government targeted at city magistrates (mirrors-for-magistrates) across modern geographical and linguistic boundaries. To this end, I have extended my research focus from communal Italy to the cities of the Southern Low Countries and the Rhine Area, covering the three most urbanized areas of medieval Europe and stretching from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries (1200-1600). I am particularly interested in the promises and expectations of good government embedded in these texts and their role in building political trust in medieval cities. In addition, I am undertaking a transinstitutional comparison of these mirrors-for-magistrates to the better-known mirrors-for-princes genre, thus moving beyond the traditional dichotomy between monarchical and republican forms of government and focusing instead on the shared ideal of virtuous rulership. Moreover, I have developed an interest in the relationship between these political texts (on good government) and urban material culture (art and architecture).

Linked to my interest in the building of political trust and questions of good government, I have also developed a second line of research, looking into the history of democracy. Together with Em. Prof. Dr Kenneth Pennington, I have edited a volume on medieval democracy for a six-part series, entitled A Cultural History of Democracy, under the general editorship of Prof. Dr Eugenio Biagini. Building upon this experience, I am now part of a team at Utrecht University that aims to set up an interdisciplinary research platform to investigate democracy from different academic perspectives, to facilitate cross-disciplinary dialogue within and outside the university, and to translate research outcomes into targeted responses to the many challenges faced by liberal democracies in our time.

Finally, I am involved in the editing of medieval and early modern texts. More specifically, I am active as an editor within the Erasmus's Opera Omnia project (ASD), having just completed an edition of Erasmus's Apologiae tres contra Lutherum and his Apologiae contra Petrum Corsum. For the same series I am currently preparing an edition of Erasmus's Ratio verae theologiae. Having confirmed the existence of a second copy of the Oculus pastoralis (1220s) untapped by its earlier editors (1741, 1966, and 1986) I am also in the process of preparing a new critical edition of this pivotal text, the oldest surviving representative of the podestà literature.