Francesco Marco Aresu
Francesco Marco Aresu is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned his Ph.D. in Italian literature (with a secondary field in Classical Philology) from Harvard University. He graduated in Letters from the Università degli Studi di Cagliari in Sardinia, and has Masters from Stanford University and Indiana University.
His areas of expertise are Medieval and Renaissance Italian literature, manuscript studies and history of the book, medieval and humanistic philology, Sardinian literature, textual criticism, and literary theory.
He has published on Dante’s intertextuality, the first illustrated incunable of Dante’s Commedia, Italian metrics and metricology, Boccaccio’s Teseida, Petrarca’s sestinas, Baroque theater, Folengo’s metatextuality, Alberti’s early works, and figuralism in literature. He edited and translated eighteenth-century Latin hymns for the Centro di studi filologici sardi. He is editor for the Petrarchive and associate editor for Heliotropia. His first book, Manuscript Poetics: Materiality and Textuality in Medieval Italian Literature, came out in 2023 with the University of Notre Dame Press.
Before joining the Department of Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, he taught Italian and Medieval Studies at Wesleyan University.
His areas of expertise are Medieval and Renaissance Italian literature, manuscript studies and history of the book, medieval and humanistic philology, Sardinian literature, textual criticism, and literary theory.
He has published on Dante’s intertextuality, the first illustrated incunable of Dante’s Commedia, Italian metrics and metricology, Boccaccio’s Teseida, Petrarca’s sestinas, Baroque theater, Folengo’s metatextuality, Alberti’s early works, and figuralism in literature. He edited and translated eighteenth-century Latin hymns for the Centro di studi filologici sardi. He is editor for the Petrarchive and associate editor for Heliotropia. His first book, Manuscript Poetics: Materiality and Textuality in Medieval Italian Literature, came out in 2023 with the University of Notre Dame Press.
Before joining the Department of Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, he taught Italian and Medieval Studies at Wesleyan University.
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Books by Francesco Marco Aresu
Manuscript Poetics explores the interrelationship between the material features of textual artifacts and the literary aspects of the medieval Italian texts they preserve.
This original study is both an investigation into the material foundations of literature and a reflection on notions of textuality, writing, and media in late medieval and early modern Italy. Francesco Marco Aresu examines the book-objects of manuscripts and early printed editions, asking questions about the material conditions of production, circulation, and reception of literary works. He invites scholars to reconcile reading with seeing (and with touching) and to challenge contemporary presumptions about technological neutrality and the modes of interfacing and reading. Manuscript Poetics investigates the correspondences between textuality and materiality, content and medium, and visual-verbal messages and their physical support through readings of Dante Alighieri’s Vita nova, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Teseida, and Francesco Petrarca’s canzoniere (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta). Aresu shows that Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarca evaluated and deployed the tools of scribal culture to shape, signal, or layer meanings beyond those they conveyed in their written texts. Medieval texts, Aresu argues, are uniquely positioned to provide this perspective, and they are foundational to the theoretical understanding of new forms and materials in our media-saturated contemporary world.
Journal Articles by Francesco Marco Aresu
and textual transmission of the fragment.
Keywords: Ennius, Inferno 28, intertextuality, Sergius (grammarian), tmesis
Book Chapters by Francesco Marco Aresu
Book Articles by Francesco Marco Aresu
Curatorial Work by Francesco Marco Aresu
Book Reviews by Francesco Marco Aresu
Talks, Panels, Lectures, etc. by Francesco Marco Aresu
Papers by Francesco Marco Aresu
Manuscript Poetics explores the interrelationship between the material features of textual artifacts and the literary aspects of the medieval Italian texts they preserve.
This original study is both an investigation into the material foundations of literature and a reflection on notions of textuality, writing, and media in late medieval and early modern Italy. Francesco Marco Aresu examines the book-objects of manuscripts and early printed editions, asking questions about the material conditions of production, circulation, and reception of literary works. He invites scholars to reconcile reading with seeing (and with touching) and to challenge contemporary presumptions about technological neutrality and the modes of interfacing and reading. Manuscript Poetics investigates the correspondences between textuality and materiality, content and medium, and visual-verbal messages and their physical support through readings of Dante Alighieri’s Vita nova, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Teseida, and Francesco Petrarca’s canzoniere (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta). Aresu shows that Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarca evaluated and deployed the tools of scribal culture to shape, signal, or layer meanings beyond those they conveyed in their written texts. Medieval texts, Aresu argues, are uniquely positioned to provide this perspective, and they are foundational to the theoretical understanding of new forms and materials in our media-saturated contemporary world.
and textual transmission of the fragment.
Keywords: Ennius, Inferno 28, intertextuality, Sergius (grammarian), tmesis