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October 2021-April 2022
Marco Faini was the recipient of a three-year Marie Skłodowska Curie Global Fellowship at the Universities of Venice and Toronto (2018-2021). Previously he was Andrew W. Mellon at ‘Villa I Tatti. The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies’, Research Associate at the Department of Italian, University of Cambridge, stipendiat at the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel. His research interests include comic literature, biblical epic, the history of devotion and devotional print, and the history of doubt. He has recently co-edited two volumes on Domestic Devotions in Early Modern Italy, and Domestic Devotions in the Early Modern World (Brill). He is the co-editor with Paola Ugolini of A Companion to Pietro Aretino (Brill, 2021) and with Élise Boillet of a collection of studies titled Le doute dans l’Europe moderne (Brepols, 2022). He is the author of Standing at the Crossroads. Writings on Doubt in Renaissance Italy, currently under review at Legenda / MHRA.
My ICUB project Stupendous Crimes: Crime, Culture, and the Print Market in Early Modern Italy (1550-1760) deals with the representation of crime and criminals in early modern Italian popular print. Stories of atrocious misdeeds were performed and sold by mountebanks and street hawkers and eagerly sought-after by readers. Easily read and/or memorized, these booklets disclosed a world of heinous actions and wicked individuals who challenged all accepted standards of human behaviour. Scholarship has traditionally dealt with these works as examples of post-Tridentine attempts at disciplining the urban and rural masses. In some cases, anthropologists have turned to them to understand beliefs associated with death, crime, and punishment. Besides, these works have raised the interest of scholars investigating early modern networks of information and the circulation of the news. In general, this corpus of works has been understood as an expression of the long-lasting, and hardly changing, social world of the low classes. In my project, I study a selection of these works analysing how the representation of crime – especially when hyperbolic – is connected with the perception of religious, political, and ethnic otherness. In addition, I explore how popular print gave rise to certain criminal characters or “types” that will enjoy success in later, and “higher”, literature, thus building a sort of archaeology of the moral monsters that populate late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century Italian and European tales and novels.