Caterina Bruschi is Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Birmingham. Caterina comes from Parma, Italy. She graduated in 1993 at the University of Bologna in Classical Literature and Philology, but discussed a BA Dissertation on the History of Heresy and the Medieval Church in her native town, under the supervision of Professor Lorenzo Paolini. She studied in Bologna for her PhD in Romance Philology and Medieval Culture, and completed it in 1996. Her dissertation was the critical edition of a 1235 anti-heretical treatise written by a layman in the city of Piacenza.
After the PhD she worked at the same time for various Academic Institutions (Ecole Francaise de Rome|, Centro Italiano di Studi per l’Alto Medioevo|, University of Bologna, Brown University – USA -), and in the ‘real’ world. She came to England in 1998 to work with Professor Peter Biller at the University of York on a 2-year project on French and Italian Cathar heresy. Since then, she joined the University of Birmingham in 2000 as a Lecturer in Medieval History, has married a Scotsman and has two little children.
Current research
Caterina has just completed a 6-months AHRC fellowship and produced an article on the ‘Familia inquisitionis’, the inquisitors’ entourage, forthcoming. Also, she has just finished a long-standing project on the transmission of stereotypes (the greedy inquisitor) between judicial and literary sources, in Thirteenth-Fourteenth century Florence.
Past research
Humiliati in Emilia-Romagna – Italy – between c. XIII and XIV; Heresy and Inquisition in Northern Italy; Female and lay sainthood in the North of Italy; anti-heretical texts, their construction and reception; Dominican and Franciscan Inquisition in the Late Middle Ages; heresy and ghibellinismin the c. XIII; heresy in the Languedoc.