Francesca Roversi Monaco deals with the history of historiography, political and institutional history and medievalism, with a particular focus on historical narration as construction and invention of shared memory, identity and collective self-consciousness. The past as a cultural creation, reconstructed and reorganised in a political function, and the 'past as text', constitute the leitmotif of his studies, which focus on the function of historiographical texts in the historical-political milieu in which they matured, on the models of interpretation and writing of events, on the political-cultural strategies underlying historical-literary production, on the analysis of the relationship between history/historical representation, and of the ways in which the past is rewritten, also with regard to the relations between history and literature, history and cinema, history and iconography.
With regard to Medievalism, she investigates the use of the medieval past - metahistorical and polysemous - in the historical-literary sources of successive epochs, with attention to different forms of 'medievalism' according to the functions attributed to the idea of the Middle Ages over time. She focuses on fictio of the reinvention of the past as a 'landscape with ruins'. In fact, if the past is lost forever and historical memory is the result of a selection of events oriented by the present, the ruins in the landscape are the fragments of memory to be put together and to combine and offer to a public able to identify them as such. The relationship between history and literature is thus investigated in the light of two substantial aspects: the historical narrative as the 'source' of an event contemporary to the narrative itself; the historical narrative as an oriented reinvention of the past functional to specific purposes, each time identifiable.
