Career Details

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 was selected immediately afterwards by the Italian Governmental body to embark in a PhD in Romance Philology and Medieval Culture – accordingly to the Italian system – which she finished 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

Dr Bruschi is currently publishing a joint-critical edition (with Peter Biller and Shelagh Sneddon) of vol. 25 of the Collection Doat, Bibliothque Nationale Paris, which contains records of the trial interrogations of heretics by the Inquisition from the 1270s. The book will be published by Brill. She is also completing a monograph on the relationships between Italian and French Cathars to be published by CUP in 2006.

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.

Teaching

Undergraduate

Level 1

Introducing Medieval History 

Level 2

Option: Travel in the Middle Ages
Group Research: Wills in Late Medieval England.
Medieval Societies: Germany and Italy in the ‘Long Thirteenth century’

Level 3
Special Subject: Heresy and Heretics in the Middle Ages

Select Publications

P. Biller, C. Bruschi, S. Sneddon (eds.), Inquisitors and Heretics in Thirteenth-Century Languedoc: Edition and Translation of Toulouse Inquisition Depositions 1273-1280, Brill (forthcoming).

C. Bruschi, The Wandering Heretics of Languedoc, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press (2009)

C. Bruschi, ‘Inquisizione francescana in Toscana fino al pontificato di Giovanni XXII’, in Frati minori e inquisizione. Atti del XXXIII Convegno internazionale (Assisi 6-8 Ottobre 2005), Spoleto 2006, pp. 287-324.

C. Bruschi, Decostruzione testuale nel consilium agli inquisitori di Carcassonne del 1330 (Doat 32), in Studi in onore di Ovidio Capitani, (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Collection Doat, vol. 32)', in De Matteis, M.C. (ed.), Ovidio Capitani: quaranta anni per la storia medioevale, 2 vols., Bologna, 2003, vol. II, pp. 137-50.

C. Bruschi, Gli inquisitori Raoul de Plassac e Pons de Parnac e l'inchiesta Tolosana degli anni 1273-80, in Praedicatores Inquisitores, I, The Dominicans and the Medieval Inquisition/. /Acts of the 1st International Seminar on the Dominicans and the Inquisition (Rome, 23-5 February 2002)/, Rome, 2004, pp. 471-93.

C. Bruschi, La memoria dall'eresia alla riammissione. Le cronache quattrocentesche degli Umiliati, Mélanges de l'École Française de Rome 115 (2003), pp. 325-40.

C. Bruschi (ed.), Salvus Burcius, Liber Suprastella, Roma, Istituto Storico per il Medio Evo (Fonti per la storia d’Italia) Antiquitates, 15) (2002).

C.Bruschi-P.Biller (eds), Trials and Treatises. Texts on heresy and inquisition, (‘York Studies in Medieval Theology’ 4) (Boydell and Brewer 2003) [including two articles: "'Magna diligentia est habenda per inquisitorem': Precautions before reading Doat 21-26", pp. 81-110, and "The 'Register in the Register': Reflections on the Doat 32 Dossier", pp. 209-220].

C. Bruschi, ‘Detur ergo Sathane’. Il tema della ‘vindicta’ nel ‘Liber Suprastella’ di Salvo Burci, Mélange de l’École Française de Rome 112 (2000) - 1, pp. 149-182.

C. Bruschi, Gli Umiliati a Parma (XIII-XIV secolo). Instaurazione e sviluppo di rapporti molteplici, ‘Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa’, 2000, pp. 209-238.

C. Bruschi, Il ‘Liber Suprastella’, fonte piacentina: l’ambiente ed il motivo di produzione, ‘Archivio Storico per le Province Parmensi’, IV ser., 49 (1997), pp. 405-427.

C. Bruschi, ‘Liber qui Suprastella dicitur’. Primi rilievi testuali sulla struttura e la tecnica polemica, ‘Bollettino della Societa` di Studi Valdesi’, 179 (1997), pp. 95-108.