Margaret Meserve

Margaret Meserve studies the Italian Renaissance and the histories of printing and book production; history writing; humanist culture; and the papacy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Her latest book, Papal Bull: Politics, Propaganda, and Print in Renaissance Rome (Johns Hopkins, 2021), examines the publication of news, propaganda, and disinformation in Rome in the first decades after the arrival of print (ca 1470-1527). The book was awarded the 2022 Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize by the American Catholic Historical Association and was highly commended for the DeLong Book Prize by the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP). Her previous book, Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (Harvard, 2008), surveyed how Renaissance historians and political commentators tried to explain the rise and fall of Islamic empires, especially that of the Ottoman Turks; it won the American Historical Association's 2008 Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize and the Renaissance Society of America's Phyllis Goodhart Gordon Prize for 2009. Meserve has also published articles on medieval and Renaissance news, rhetoric, legal culture, poetry, and monsters. Three volumes of her translation of Pope Pius II's autobiographical Commentaries have appeared in the I Tatti Renaissance Library, and more are on the way. Meserve has won fellowships from the NEH, ACLS, American Academy in Rome, and the Newberry Library in Chicago. At Notre Dame she teaches courses on the Italian Renaissance, early modern Rome, Italian social history, and the history of the book.