Staff profile

My research investigates how knowledge was produced, transmitted, and transformed in medieval Italy, with particular attention to the dynamic relationship between orality, scholastic thought, and vernacular literature. I study how the institutional and performative frameworks of late-medieval education—above all the lectiones and the disputationes, (in particular quodlibeta) held in mendicant and university settings—shaped the doctrinal architecture of texts by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. By analysing these exchanges across Latin and vernacular sources, I aim to reconstruct the mechanisms through which scholastic reasoning entered literary form.

I trained in Pavia (BA, MA) as an alumnus of the Collegio Ghislieri, and completed my MA and PhD in Italian Studies at the University of Notre Dame in 2020. Before joining Durham in 2023, I held research and teaching positions at Notre Dame, Trinity College Dublin, and the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. My work has been supported by major international fellowships, including the University Presidential Fellowship in Humanities and Social Sciences, the Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship, and the William M. Calder III Fellowship.

My first monograph, Il poeta alle “scuole delli religiosi”: Dante, Pietro delle Travi e il convento di Santa Croce (1294–1296) (Rome: Carocci, 2026), offers the first systematic reconstruction of the oral scholastic environment that shaped Dante’s early intellectual formation. Drawing on a corpus of previously unedited manuscripts containing transcriptions of lectures and disputations held in Florence in the 1290s, the book demonstrates that Dante’s engagement with mendicant schools was not peripheral but constitutive of his philosophical and theological imagination. It further shows that Dante’s earliest works adopt a militant stance toward this environment: they resemanticise the argumentative forms and lexicon of scholastic discourse within a salvific conception of literature, transforming theological reasoning into poetic revelation and asserting a new, autonomous model of lay intellectual authority in opposition to the mendicant masters.

A second volume, Quodlibetal Culture in Dante’s Time (University of Notre Dame Press, 2026; co-edited with Paola Nasti and William Duba), expands this perspective to the broader Italian context, mapping the diffusion of quodlibetal disputations in the late-medieval city. Together, these works establish the basis for a long-term research programme on orality, disputation, and the vernacularisation of knowledge in pre-modern Italy.

This programme develops further in my current project, ORAL-IT: Scholastic Debates and the Making of Vernacular Literacy in Late Medieval Italy (1290–1375), which examines how the culture of disputation that flourished in Florence, Bologna, and Padua contributed to the emergence of vernacular literacy. ORAL-IT combines palaeographical, codicological, and digital-humanities methodologies to produce the first systematic census and digital atlas of Italian scholastic debates. Through case studies on Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, the project demonstrates how oral and performative practices conditioned the transfer of scholastic argumentation into literary and poetic form.

More broadly, my research situates the Italian Middle Ages within the European history of knowledge production, tracing how modes of inquiry and proof migrated from theology and philosophy into literature. It intervenes in current debates on intellectual history, reception, and digital philology by integrating textual scholarship with computational analysis and the reconstruction of fragmentary manuscripts.

I welcome PhD proposals on Dante and medieval intellectual culture, on the interaction between Latin and vernacular learning, on manuscript and commentarial traditions, and on digital approaches to medieval textuality.

My full CV is available here. 

You can watch some of my talks on Dante on YouTube here: 1, 2, 3, 4. 

• Dante Studies
• Medieval Italian Literature
• Early Modern Italian Literature
• Vernacular transmission of Aristotle
• Late-Medieval Aristotelianism
• Reception Studies
• Intellectual History
• Manuscript Studies
• Digital Humanities

Authored book

• Il poeta alle "scuole delli religiosi": Dante, Pietro delle Travi e il convento di Santa Croce (1294-1296)
  
  Dell’Oso, L. (in press). Il poeta alle "scuole delli religiosi": Dante, Pietro delle Travi e il convento di Santa Croce (1294-1296). Carocci Editore.

Chapter in book

• Dante “accademico” o “antiaccademico”? Una nota sul Convivio e l’ambiente universitario
  
  Dell’Oso, L. (in press). Dante “accademico” o “antiaccademico”? Una nota sul Convivio e l’ambiente universitario. Franco Cesati Editore.
• Vita nova XLI [30]
  
  Dell’Oso, L. (2023). Vita nova XLI [30]. In Z. G. Baranski & H. Webb (Eds.), Dante’s ‘Vita nova’: A Collaborative Reading (pp. 366–371). University of Notre Dame Press.
• Dispute bolognesi al tempo di Dante: un Quodlibet medico di Giovanni da Parma (Vat. Lat. 4452, 144r-v)
  
  Dell’Oso, L. (2022). Dispute bolognesi al tempo di Dante: un Quodlibet medico di Giovanni da Parma (Vat. Lat. 4452, 144r-v). In A. Antonelli & F. Meier (Eds.), Dante e Bologna. Istituzioni, convergenze e saperi (pp. 195-214). Giorgio Pozzi Editore.
• Lettori cinquecenteschi della Commedia. Postille e stampe dantesche nell’Università di Notre Dame
  
  Dell’Oso, L. (2021). Lettori cinquecenteschi della Commedia. Postille e stampe dantesche nell’Università di Notre Dame. In A. Sorella (Ed.), Integrazioni all’esegesi dantesca nel cinquecentenario della morte di Bernardo Bembo (pp. 167–184). Franco Cesati Editori.
• Tra Bibbia e ‘letteratura di costumanza:’ un’ipotesi su ‘Ecce deus fortior me’ (Vita nova, II.4)
  
  Dell’Oso, L. (2019). Tra Bibbia e ‘letteratura di costumanza:’ un’ipotesi su ‘Ecce deus fortior me’ (Vita nova, II.4). In Dante e la cultura fiorentina. Bono Giamboni, Brunetto Latini e la formazione intellettuale dei laici (pp. 221–240). Salerno Editrice.
• Dal Trattatello di Boccaccio alla formazione di Dante: alcune note di lavoro
  
  Dell’Oso, L. (2017). Dal Trattatello di Boccaccio alla formazione di Dante: alcune note di lavoro. In Boccaccio e Dintorni. Atti del seminario internazionale di studi, Certaldo Alta, Casa del Boccaccio, 9 Settembre 2016, ed. Stefano Zamponi (pp. 1–12). Firenze University Press. https://doi.org/10.36253/978-88-6453-844-0
• “Knowing the Truth of Faith through the Science of Letters”: Peter of Trabibus’s Quodlibeta and the Making of Dante’s Formation in Florence
  
  Dell’Oso, L. (n.d.). “Knowing the Truth of Faith through the Science of Letters”: Peter of Trabibus’s Quodlibeta and the Making of Dante’s Formation in Florence. In Quodlibetal Culture in Dante’s Time.

Edited book

• ‘In terra per le vostre scole’ (Par. XXIX, 70): Dante’s Paradiso and the Medieval Academic World. Special Issue of Humanities
  
  Meier, F., & Dell’Oso, L. (Eds.). (2024). ‘In terra per le vostre scole’ (Par. XXIX, 70): Dante’s Paradiso and the Medieval Academic World. Special Issue of Humanities. MDPI.
• Aggiornamento bibliografico dell’Enciclopedia Dantesca (2006-2021)
  
  Dell’Oso, L. (Ed.). (2021). Aggiornamento bibliografico dell’Enciclopedia Dantesca (2006-2021). Treccani.

Journal Article

• "Sì come il Maestro ne dimostra nel secondo delle Sentenzie”: the pedagogical theology in Boccaccio’s Esposizioni
  
  Dell’Oso, L. (in press). "Sì come il Maestro ne dimostra nel secondo delle Sentenzie”: the pedagogical theology in Boccaccio’s Esposizioni. Heliotropia.
• Reading and Listening to the Liber de causis in Florence. Dante and the Emanationism of Amor che movi
  
  Dell’Oso, L. (in press). Reading and Listening to the Liber de causis in Florence. Dante and the Emanationism of Amor che movi. Romanic Review.
• L’Inferno a Firenze? Su alcuni elementi teologici dei primi canti della Commedia (Inf. I-IV)
  
  Dell’Oso, L. (2024). L’Inferno a Firenze? Su alcuni elementi teologici dei primi canti della Commedia (Inf. I-IV). Italianistica: Rivista Di Letteratura Italiana, LIII(3).
• Dante, Peter of Trabibus, and the ‘Schools of the Religious Orders’ in Florence
  
  Dell’Oso, L. (2022). Dante, Peter of Trabibus, and the ‘Schools of the Religious Orders’ in Florence. Italian Studies, 77(3), 211-229. https://doi.org/10.1080/00751634.2022.2040866
• Astronomy, Philosophy, and Theology in Dante’s Florence: from Vita nova II.1-2 to Paradiso XXIX, 85-102
  
  Dell’Oso, L. (2022). Astronomy, Philosophy, and Theology in Dante’s Florence: from Vita nova II.1-2 to Paradiso XXIX, 85-102. Dante Studies, 140, 22-44. https://doi.org/10.1353/das.2022.a903955
• Looking at Books, Instead of Reading Them: A Conversation with Randall McLeod
  
  Dell’Oso, L. (2018). Looking at Books, Instead of Reading Them: A Conversation with Randall McLeod. Tipofilologia: Rivista Internazionale Di Studi Sui Testi a Stampa Della Letteratura Italiana Ed Europea, 11, 131-141. https://doi.org/10.19272/201810201003
• Su Dante e la dialettica: Convivio II. XIII.11-12 e la logica in Santa Croce
  
  Dell’Oso, L. (2018). Su Dante e la dialettica: Convivio II. XIII.11-12 e la logica in Santa Croce. L’Alighieri, 52, 37-49. https://doi.org/10.1400/266842
• Dalla filologia alla tipografia: su due varianti sostanziali tra la Dipintura nella ‘Scienza Nuova’ del 1730 e del 1744
  
  Dell’Oso, L. (2017). Dalla filologia alla tipografia: su due varianti sostanziali tra la Dipintura nella ‘Scienza Nuova’ del 1730 e del 1744. Historia Philosophica: An International Journal, 15, 43-62.
• Per la formazione intellettuale di Dante: i cataloghi librari, le tracce testuali, il ‘Trattatello’ di Boccaccio
  
  Dell’Oso, L. (2017). Per la formazione intellettuale di Dante: i cataloghi librari, le tracce testuali, il ‘Trattatello’ di Boccaccio. Le Tre Corone, 4, 129-161. https://doi.org/10.19272/201712101007
• Un domenicano contro la stampa. Nuove acquisizioni al corpus di Filippo da Strada
  
  Dell’Oso, L. (2014). Un domenicano contro la stampa. Nuove acquisizioni al corpus di Filippo da Strada. Tipofilologia: Rivista Internazionale Di Studi Sui Testi a Stampa Della Letteratura Italiana Ed Europea, 7, 69-102.
• Reopening a Question of Attribution: Programmatic Notes about Boccaccio and the Translation of Livy
  
  Dell’Oso, L. (2013). Reopening a Question of Attribution: Programmatic Notes about Boccaccio and the Translation of Livy. Heliotropia, 10(1-2), 1-16.
• Versi volgari del tardo Quattrocento nel ms. Notre Dame Lat. d. 5
  
  Dell’Oso, L. (2013). Versi volgari del tardo Quattrocento nel ms. Notre Dame Lat. d. 5. Studi Di Filologia Italiana, 71, 347–353.

Newspaper/Magazine Article

• ChatGPT e il futuro della medievistica: alcune proposte
  
  Dell’Oso, L. (2023, July 3). ChatGPT e il futuro della medievistica: alcune proposte. Le Parole E le Cose.