IPH – Introduction to Medieval History

After graduating from the Università degli Studi di Torino in 2006-2007, Stefano Manganaro obtained his PhD in Medieval Studies from the Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane (SUM/Palazzo Strozzi) in Florence in 2010-2011. He then held a postdoctoral fellowship from the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici (IISS) in Naples (2011-2012, 2013-2015). During Summer 2014, he did research at the Forschungsstelle für Vergleichende Ordensgeschichte (FOVOG) in Dresden. In 2016 he has been a visiting fellow at the Internationales Kolleg für Geisteswissenschaftliche Forschung (IKGF), Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU). In 2017 he taught as an Adjunct Professor (Professore a contratto) at the Università degli Studi di Pavia and did research at the Deutsches Historisches Institut (DHI) in Rome. In 2018 he was a visiting fellow at the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte (MPIeR) in Frankfurt am Main, while he worked at the Società Napoletana di Storia Patria (SNSP/Maschio Angioino) in Naples in 2020, and then he came back to the Deutsches Historisches Institut (DHI) in Rome. He held a DAAD-scholarship at the Universität Leipzig in 2021. Currently, he is a postdoctoral researcher at the Università di Pisa.

His research focuses on the mutual interaction between religious beliefs, political thought, and institutional workings in the Early and High Middle Ages. Stefano Manganaro is particularly interested in the Ottonian period (from the tenth to the early eleventh century), when a highly sacred kingship, shaped by a liturgical-monastic mentality, had to cope with weak administrative structures. Early and high medieval institutions were not coherent structures of political organisation, nor were they as strictly formalised as the modern Western view of standardised legal institutions would demand. In his research, Stefano Manganaro, therefore, aims to understand and reconstruct how these institutions could exist and work under such circumstances.

He was awarded the Premio Giuseppe Galasso 2018 (First Edition), receiving this book award for the following monograph: Stabilitas regni. Percezione del tempo e durata dell’azione politica nell’età degli Ottoni (936-1024), Bologna, Il Mulino, 2018.

In 2020 he obtained the National Scientific Qualification (ASN) to function as Associate Professor of Medieval History at Italian universities.

Stefano Manganaro is a member of the following academic institutions: Centro di ricerca sulle istituzioni e le società medievali – Turin (CRISM); Römisches Institut der Görres-Gesellschaft – Città del Vaticano/Bonn (RIGG); International Society for the Critical Study of Divination – Erlangen-Nürnberg; PSALM-Network (Politics, Society, and Liturgy in the Middle Ages); Società italiana degli storici medievisti (SISMED); and Centro internazionale di studi sulle culture del pellegrinaggio (CISCuP). He has been recognized as an Expert in Medieval Studies (Cultore della materia) at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan.