Bianca Facchini

Research Fellow

I work on Latin language and literature, including the postclassical developments of the Latin literary tradition; moreover, I am interested in the reception of Graeco-Roman antiquity in later cultural contexts. My research especially focuses on late medieval and neo-Latin literature and on the reception of ancient Greek and Latin texts in the late Middle Ages and the Italian Renaissance. Alongside writing on the reception of Lucan's Bellum Civile in fourteenth-century Italy, I have been working on the Latin works of Italian Renaissance authors such as Albertino Mussato and Francesco Petrarch, and I am also interested in unpublished Latin epic from fifteenth-century Italy. During my post-doc, I have expanded the scope of my research to consider neo-Latin poetry from early modern Britain, viewed in relation to the earlier Italian neo-Latin tradition.

Biography:

For my BA (2007-10) and MA (2010-12) I studied Classics at the University of Padua, where I also attended the Scuola Galileiana di Studi Superiori (the School of Excellence of the University of Padua). I completed a PhD in Italian Studies and Medieval Studies at the University of California, Berkeley (2012-17). During my PhD, I was a DAAD visiting scholar at LMU Munich, Medieval Latin Institute (Spring 2016) and a visiting researcher at KCL, Classics department (Fall 2016). From July 2017, I have been working as a postdoctoral research associate on Dr. Victoria Moul's Leverhulme-funded project "Latin Poetry in English Manuscript Verse Miscellanies, c. 1550-1700", and I have been based at University College London from February 2019.

Selected publications:

Critical edition of Mussato's De Lite inter Naturam et Fortunam; under contract with SISMEL — Edizione Nazionale dei Testi Mediolatini d'Italia (the submitted manuscript has been approved for publication in Autumn 2019).

‘Lucan and Virgil: from Dante to Petrarch (and Boccaccio)’. International Journal of the Classical Tradition 27 (2020), pp. 1-22 (published online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-018-0482-x).

‘“As Lucan says”: Dante's Reuse of the Bellum Civile in the Monarchia and the Political Epistles’. Mediaevalia. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Medieval Studies Worldwide 40 (2019), pp. 81-106.

‘Petrarch's Lucan and the Ambiguities of Ancient Heroism’. Humanistica. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Early Renaissance Studies 13.2 (2018) [in press].

‘Albertino Mussato: ultime riflessioni sulla poesia’. In ‘Moribus antiquis sibi me fecere poetam’. Albertino Mussato nel VII centenario dell'incoronazione poetica (Padova 1315-2015), edited by Rino Modonutti and Enrico Zucchi. Florence: Sismel, 2017, pp. 133-50.

‘Il Cesare di Lucano, da Dante a Manzoni’. Intersezioni 36/3 (2016), pp. 437-42.

‘A Philosophical Quarrel among Auctoritates: Mussato’s De Lite inter Naturam et Fortunam and its Classical and Medieval Sources’. Italia Medioevale e Umanistica 55 (2014), pp. 71-102.

‘Petrarca e l'agiografia camaldolese: la fonte della vita di san Romualdo nel Legendario di Nicolò Malerbi’. Hagiographica 21 (2014), pp. 179-96.

‘Giurisprudenza da favola. Note sul lessico giuridico delle Metamorfosi di Apuleio’. Lexis 29 (2011), pp. 301-24.