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At the time, Italy was fragmented into dozens of autonomous cities and polities. After a period of economic expansion in the thirteenth century, the combined pressure of political instability and the Black Death led authorities to develop mechanisms to control who was allowed to enter, work, and settle in their spaces.
Traditional narratives suggest that Europe witnessed a shift from physical boundaries to systems of documentation only after the year 1500. By focusing on the uniquely complex space of the peninsula, I argue instead that a radical bureaucratic change took place in the fourteenth and the fifteenth century, which provided a fundamental infrastructure for the later emergence of a central bureaucracy of movement.
The project understands bureaucratic change as a fundamentally social and political process, involving people as well as institutions. On the one hand, I look at the formal development of passes, permits, and other comparable papers. On the other hand, I examine the experience of mobile people—how they were affected by, engaged with, and shaped these emerging documentary practices, including cases of violation and fraud.
By combining traditional archival research with approaches drawn from the social sciences, political theory, and migration studies, the project also attempts to situate the question of medieval mobility control in the context of contemporary debates about power, borders, and identity.
Recommended Reading
Barucci, Teresa. “Self-Presentation and Geographical Origin at the Fifteenth-Century University of Paris: An Analysis of Manuscript Decoration.” Journal of Medieval History 49, no. 4 (2023): 558–582. https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2023.2235367.
–. “The Medieval Public Sphere and the Response to a Condemnation for Heresy in Bologna, 1299.” The English Historical Review 139, no. 598–599 (2024): 651–679. https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceae109.
© privat
2026/2027
Teresa Barucci, PhD
Research Fellow
Universität Oxford
Born in 1996 in Florence, Italy
BA in Ancient History, Durham University, MSt in Medieval History, University of Oxford, PhD in History, University of Cambridge
Arbeitsvorhaben
Papers across Borders: Regulating and Documenting Mobility in Late Medieval Italy
Who are you? Where are you from? Do you have the right to be here? These questions are urgent not only today—they were a real preoccupation in the Middle Ages too. Although passports and visas are commonly viewed as a feature of the nation state, the precursor of the modern border management system has a long (and largely unexplored) history. My project explores the development of travel documentation, and more broadly of mobility control, in late medieval Italy.At the time, Italy was fragmented into dozens of autonomous cities and polities. After a period of economic expansion in the thirteenth century, the combined pressure of political instability and the Black Death led authorities to develop mechanisms to control who was allowed to enter, work, and settle in their spaces.
Traditional narratives suggest that Europe witnessed a shift from physical boundaries to systems of documentation only after the year 1500. By focusing on the uniquely complex space of the peninsula, I argue instead that a radical bureaucratic change took place in the fourteenth and the fifteenth century, which provided a fundamental infrastructure for the later emergence of a central bureaucracy of movement.
The project understands bureaucratic change as a fundamentally social and political process, involving people as well as institutions. On the one hand, I look at the formal development of passes, permits, and other comparable papers. On the other hand, I examine the experience of mobile people—how they were affected by, engaged with, and shaped these emerging documentary practices, including cases of violation and fraud.
By combining traditional archival research with approaches drawn from the social sciences, political theory, and migration studies, the project also attempts to situate the question of medieval mobility control in the context of contemporary debates about power, borders, and identity.
Recommended Reading
Barucci, Teresa. “Self-Presentation and Geographical Origin at the Fifteenth-Century University of Paris: An Analysis of Manuscript Decoration.” Journal of Medieval History 49, no. 4 (2023): 558–582. https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2023.2235367.
–. “The Medieval Public Sphere and the Response to a Condemnation for Heresy in Bologna, 1299.” The English Historical Review 139, no. 598–599 (2024): 651–679. https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceae109.