Foto del docente

Fernanda Alfieri

Junior assistant professor (fixed-term)

Department of History and Cultures

Academic discipline: M-STO/02 Modern History

Research

Keywords:

My research is dedicated to sexual discipline in the Early modern age, an issue that requires the adoption of a long-term perspective and intersects the organization of the living in its deepest political and social dimensions. I dealt with this in my first monograph Nella camera degli sposi. Tomás Sánchez, il matrimonio, la sessualità (secoli XVI-XVII),Bologna, il Mulino, 2010. The preparation of a volume on the history of sexuality in Early modern Europe is underway.

In recent years, my investigation has extended to the history of scientific thought on the relationship between mind and body, up to the threshold of the twentieth century (a perspective I adopted in the essay Tracking Jesuit Psychologies. From Ubiquitous Discourse on the Soul to Institutionalized Discipline, in I.G Županov (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Jesuits, New York - Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019). The problem of the relationship between mind and body prompted me to the dialogue with neuroscience within the framework of a cycle of seminars organized between 2015 and 2016 and in two essays published in the journals Storica (2015) and Storia della storiografia (2019). The dialogue with a disciplinary area apparently so different has prompted methodological reflection and the questioning of the theoretical and anthropological framework within which a historical investigation can be carried out on the notions of conscience and on the knowledge called to know and govern it. This is one of the themes at the center of the monograph Veronica e il diavolo. Storia di un esorcismo a Roma, Torino, Einaudi, 2021.

The volume Christianity and Violence in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. Perspectives from Europe and Japan, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2021 co-edited with T. Jinno (Waseda, Tokyo) collects the first results of an Italian-Japanese research network. It observes the intertwining between violence and religion, exploring some founding ideas and their development into a body of sources that includes political treatises, demonological literature, missionary correspondence, images.