Margaret Meserve
Carl E. Koch Assistant Professor of History
Field
Early Modern Europe
Profile
Margaret Meserve joined the department in 2003, after earning a BA in Classics from Harvard and an MA and PhD from the Warburg Institute of the University of London. She specializes in the intellectual and cultural history of the Italian Renaissance. Her book, Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (Harvard University Press, 2008), surveys how fifteenth-centrury historians and political commentators tried to explain the rise and fall of Islamic empires, and especially the origins and rise of the Ottoman Turks. She has also published articles on anti-Turkish polemics in the Renaissance; European knowledge of Asia in the centuries after Marco Polo; and the printing of crusade propaganda and news reports from the Orient in the first decades after Gutenberg. Two volumes of her translation of the crusading Pope Pius II's autobiographical Commentaries have been published by Harvard University Press (in 2004 and 2007; more are on the way). In 2006-7 Meserve held NEH and ACLS fellowships as well as a Rome Prize fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, where she began a new project on the circulation of news and political commentary in Italy in the first decades after the arrival of print (ca 1470-1527).
Teaching Interests
Meserve teaches undergraduate courses on the Italian Renaissance, the urban histories of Florence and Rome, social and family history, and the age of European exploration. She has led graduate seminars and reading groups on Renaissance humanism, historiography, and cultural history.
Recent Publications
Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (Harvard University Press), 2008.
"News from Negroponte: Politics, Popular Opinion, and Information Exchange in the First Decade of the Italian Press," Renaissance Quarterly 59 (2006)
"Italian Humanists and the Problem of the Crusade," in The Crusade in the Fifteenth Century: Message and Impact, ed. N. Housley (Palgrave, 2004)
"Patronage and Propaganda at the First Paris Press: Guillaume Fichet and the First Edition of Bessarion's Orations against the Turks," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 97 (2003)
"From Samarkand to Scythia: Reinventions of Asia in Renaissance Geography and Political Thought," in Pius II: el piu expeditivo pontifice. Selected Studies on Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, eds Z. R. W. M. von Martels and A. Vanderjagt (Brill, 2003)
“Medieval Sources for Renaissance Theories on the Origins of the Ottoman Turks,” in Europa und die Türken in der Renaissance, eds B. Guthmüller and W. Kühlmann (Niemayer Verlag, 2000).
Pius II, Commentaries, eds M. Meserve and M. Simonetta, The I Tatti Renaissance Library (Harvard University Press), vol. I, 2004, vol. II, 2007).
Contact
Office: 468 Decio Faculty Hall
Phone: (574) 631-8362
Email: Margaret.H.Meserve.1@nd.edu
Office Hours: On leave 2006-2007.