Carla Rossi is a Romance philologist, art historian, and palaeographer, specialising in medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, textual transmission, and visual culture between the Middle Ages and the early modern period. Active in research and cultural heritage protection for over thirty years, she has developed an integrated approach combining material philology, codicology, palaeography, and historical-artistic analysis.

Her publications include critical editions and scholarly studies on Marie de France, Anglo-Norman satirical literature, the melodic structure of Dante’s Commedia, the circle of scholars associated with Thomas Becket, and Bronzino as a poet. Since 1996, she has been engaged in the protection of Western manuscript heritage, and since 2006 she has led the research project Biblioclasm and Digital Reconstruction, which in 2024 gave rise to the homonymous editorial series.

Her work focuses in particular on illuminated manuscripts, with attention to female artistic production and to the processes of dismemberment, dispersion, and commercial circulation of codices. A significant part of her research is devoted to the digital reconstruction of disarticulated manuscripts and to provenance studies, based on the direct examination of archival sources and original materials.

She is Scientific Director of ISFiDa (Institut d’Estudis Filològics Dantescs i Digitals Avançats, Barcelona) and an honorary member of the Organisation pour la Protection des Manuscrits Médiévaux (OProM), an international network dedicated to the protection, tracking, and digital reconstruction of dispersed manuscript collections.

She has conceived and coordinated projects on the mapping of modern biblioclasm and the cataloguing of leaves detached from dismembered codices, including the Archivum Codicum Manuscriptorum Disiectorum (14th–16th centuries), available on Zenodo (DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15252470).

Author of monographs, critical editions, and specialised studies, she has published in Italian, French, and English, collaborating with academic journals, research centres, and international editorial boards. Her work has contributed to renewed attention to the role of women in medieval book production, to the public responsibility for the preservation of cultural heritage, and to the issues surrounding the dispersal of manuscript collections.

For Alta Formazione Editrice, she has co-authored, with Raffaele Pinto, the volume Desiderio e interdizione. L’amore nella lirica europea.

 

Recent publications

– Beyond the Margins. Female Illuminators in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Ethics International Press, 2025)
– Oltre i margini: il linguaggio artistico delle miniatrici europee (Libreria Universitaria Edizioni, 2025)

- Medioevo Fluido. Identità, androginia e metamorfosi di genere nelle fonti letterarie e iconografiche dell’età di mezzo (Libreria Universitaria Edizioni, 2026)

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Academic affiliations

– Scientific Director, Centro Scaligero di Studi Danteschi, Verona
– Scientific Director, Institut d’Estudis Filològics Dantescs i Digitals Avançats (ISFiDa), Barcelona

 

Profiles and resources

– www.carlarossi.art
– https://www.isfida.eu/carla-rossi-philologist
– ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6557-3684
– https://www.enciclopediadelledonne.it/edd.nsf/autrici-autori/carla-rossi