About our staff

Convener of the School Forum

Coordinator of the History and Games Lab

I graduated in Medieval History at the University of Bologna and moved for my postgraduate studies to the University of Cambridge, where I subsequently held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Teaching Associateship at Gonville and Caius College. After a  brief spell as Canon Foundation Research Fellow at the Department of Occidental History of the University of Tokyo, I was appointed Teaching Fellow in Medieval and Renaissance History and then Chancellor's Fellow in History at Edinburgh.

Fellow of the Royal Historical Society

http://edinburgh.academia.edu/GianlucaRaccagni

For a full list of recent and forthcoming projects, publications and activities: Gianluca Raccagni - Edinburgh Research Explorer

Summary of research interests

• Europe
• Mediterranean

• Ideas
• Politics
• Religion
• Society
• War

• Medieval

The siege of Parma 1248, from the chronicle of  Giovanni Villani, Biblioteca Vaticana, ms. Chigiano L VIII 296

My research explores political culture and political structures in the central Middle Ages. I focus especially on the world of the city republics of northern Italy, considering the relations among them (especially regional leagues), those  with the Holy Roman Emperor and the Papacy (including the crusades against Christian lay powers and their places in the wider crusades phenomenon), and that with medieval universities (particularly their faculties of arts and law). In addition, I am fascinated by the links of the city republics with the rest of Europe and the Mediterranean, and especially England and Byzantium.

I am currently writing a monograph on the second Lombard League, its conflict with Emperor Frederick II and its involvement in the crusades against Christian lay powers in the thirteenth century.

I am also completing a number of other works, which include:

-  An exploration of the suprisingly abundant evidence to be found in Anglo-Norman sources regarding the conflicts between the Holy Roman emperors and the Italian city republics. I am examining what caused that interest and how that evidence was acquired.

-  A study of the uses and perceptions of the Peace of Constance, an iconic document that could be described as the Magna Carta of the Lombard cities, in the thirteenth century. My sources here include governmental records, chronicles, but also rhetorical and juridical works. Some of the findings of this project have already been published.

- The second Lombard League and the Italian crusades

- The Mediterranean cities and their rulers in the long thirteenth century

- Anglo-Norman views on the conflict between the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and the Lombard cities.

- Uses and perceptions of the Peace of Constance (the Magna Carta of the Lombard cities) in the 13th century

• Introduction to Medieval Europe 2A: c.950-1200
• Introduction to Medieval Europe 2B: c.1200-1450
• History in Theory 
• History in Practice
• The crusades and Medieval Society

• Medieval Letters and Letter-Writing 
• The Crusades: thirteenth-century crossroads
• Dante's Inferno: medieval society, sin and eternal damnation
• Medieval Universities: Academic Communities, Learning and the Wider Society

Supervision

I welcome the opportunity to supervise postgraduate research on any aspect of European and Mediterranean political culture in the central Middle Ages.

Representation of the crusade of Saint Louis (BnF,Français 5716, fol. 40)