Rebecca Bowen

Rebecca Bowen is assistant professor of Italian specialised in the medieval and early modern periods. Her research focuses on early Italian lyric poetry and the works of Dante, exploring the relationships between texts, images and objects. Her first monograph investigates the words and images used to represent love from classical Antiquity, through Latin Late Antiquity and into the era of the vernacular European languages, bringing the medieval Italian canon into conversation with understudied Late Latin poets as well as canonical authors including Virgil, Ovid and Dante.

Rebecca’s current research is focused on the reception of Dante’s Commedia in the first era of printing in Italy (c. 1470–1600). Looking closely at the nearly 100 editions printed in this timespan, her research explores the ways in which Dante and his medieval poem were transformed by and for a new ‘renaissance’ readership. Placing these early printed books in the context of the scientific and technological advances that were transforming travel on a truly global scale for the first time in European history, she sheds new light on the role played by Dante’s otherworldly journey in mediating the wanderlust of sixteenth-century Italian readers.

Before coming to Notre Dame, Rebecca was a Clarendon Scholar and Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Oxford and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Insitut in Florence (KHI), part of the Max-Planck-Institut. Rebecca remains an Associate Fellow at the KHI, where she founded and directs “Dante Depicted: A Commentary on Image, Text, and Exegesis Around the Commedia”. This digital platform promotes detailed interdisciplinary study of Dante’s poem and the visual traditions inspired by it. Rebecca’s work has been published by Anglo- and Italophone journals including Dante Studies, Italian Studies, Filologia Antica e Moderna, and the journal of the Modern Humanities Research Association.

She has taught medieval Italian literature (with a focus on Dante and early lyric) in Oxford and Florence since 2017.