Caligiure, Teresa
Senior Fellow: October 2016–March 2017
Research Project: A Case of Ethical Scepticism in the Fourteenth Century: Francesco Petrarca
Teresa Caligiure’s research project will investigate the ancient sources of the sceptical attitude present in the philosophical and moral writings of Francesco Petrarca. The cultural debates around these sources, which were held between the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth centuries, have greatly influenced the thinking of Humanism during the Renaissance in Italy and Europe. The appearance of a ‘sceptical Petrarca’ in his work, will not only touch upon the ethical individual, but also contextualise it with regard to the political situation in which he lived and worked. This project will address the issue of scepticism in Petrarca’s works, particularly in the Secretum, the De ignorantia, the preface to the second book of the De remediis, in some letters and other works. It is worth investigating how Petrarca retains Augustinian ideas, according to which doubt turns into dialogue between man and the truth. As is shown in Petrarca’s controversial work De ignorantia, his point of view is polemically in contrast to the acceptance of Aristotelian principles and radical Averroism en vogue during his time.
Teresa Caligiure earned her PhD in medieval Italian literature in 2011. She was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Humanities Faculty of the University of Calabria (2013–15), where she taught language skills.