Research Topic
Cultures of Conspiracy in Sixteenth-Century Italy.
Supervisor: Filippo de Vivo
My primary interests lie in the interconnected political, cultural, and intellectual history of Early Modern Europe, with particular attention to Italy. I focus on sixteenth-century political conspiracies, and their wider transnational political and diplomatic role. My doctoral thesis combines these interests by analysing the foreign-promoted spread of political conspiracies within mid-sixteenth-century Italy, and their use as a tool for geopolitical change. More specifically, I am fascinated by the interaction of popular politics and diplomacy, and the attempts made to persuade local populations to support regime change. I am also interested in how leading contemporary Italian thinkers thought about conspiracies, both in abstract terms as well as in their analysis of specific political plots.
My research is generously funded by the Oxford Graduate Scholarship in History and University College, Oxford.
I graduated with a BA in History from St Hugh's College, Oxford (2022), with a dissertation supervised by Professor David Parrott on the implementations of 'Reason of State' theories in the Duchy of Parma in the early seventeenth century. In 2023, I completed an MSt in Early Modern History at New College, Oxford, with a dissertation supervised by Professor Filippo de Vivo, analysing the transnational and cultural implications of two political conspiracies in 1547, respectively in Genoa and Piacenza.
I am the co-convenor of the Early Modern Diplomacy Seminar (c.1400-1800). For more information, or to present a paper, please email me. I also co-lead an interdisciplinary and comparative project on early modern cryptography. Along with mathematicians and Digital Humanities experts, we use digital methods to compare the effectiveness of encoding practices employed by different European states, as well as to reconstruct lost cypher keys and break cyphered diplomatic correspondence.
Teaching:
I currently teach the following undergraduate papers:
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Prelims
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FHS |
| BIP History of the British Isles 4: c. 1500-1700 |
BIF History of the British Isles 4: Reformations and Revolutions, 1500-1700 |
| EWP 3: European and World History, 1400-1650 (Renaissance, Recovery, and Reform) |
EWF 6: Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700 |
| Historiography: Tacitus to Weber |
EWF 7: Eurasian Empires, 1450-1800 |
| Approaches to History |
Disciplines of History
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Special Subject: Politics, Art, and Culture in the Italian Renaissance: Venice and Florence, 1475-1525 |
I also teach a course on Italian Late Medieval and Early Modern Palaeography (1400-1800) for final year undergraduates and master's students.
Publications:
Antonio Pattori, and Susan Brigden, 'The Sacrifice of Thomas Cromwell', The Historical Journal (2025), pp. 1-20: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X25000196
