Margaret Meserve

Biography

Professor Meserve is a historian of the Italian Renaissance, interested in the history of Rome in the Renaissance; the history of the papacy; and the history of books and readers in this period. She teaches courses in history, the Medieval Institute, and for the Glynn Program. Her latest book, Papal Bull: Print, Politics, and Propaganda in Renaissance Rome, examines how the papacy adopted printing with movable type as a tool of propaganda and policy in the first decades after Gutenberg. She is also working on a translation of the Commentaries of Pope Pius II (r. 1458-1464), the only pope ever to compose an autobiography while in office. 

She received her A.B. degree in Classics from Harvard (1992) and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Renaissance History from the University of London (2001). She taught at Princeton for two years before coming to Notre Dame in 2003. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies and she is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.