Giorgio Lizzul

University of Warwick (UK)

Fiscality and historiography: Renaissance Italian history writing and the development of political economy

2021-2022: Spring

Giorgio Lizzul is a medieval and Renaissance historian focusing on intellectual and economic history. He holds a PhD in History from King’s College London, an MA in the History of Political Thought and Intellectual History from UCL and Queen Mary, and a BSc in Government and Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science. He has been a research fellow at I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2020–21); Das Ludwig Boltzmann Institut für Neulateinische Studien, Innsbruck; the Newberry Library, Chicago; The British School at Rome; and a member on the ERC project “Aristotle in the Italian Vernacular” at the Department of Italian Studies, University of Warwick. Between 2016–17 he was Teaching Fellow in Medieval European History at King’s College London and has also taught intellectual history at UCL and Queen Mary.

Giorgio’s research concerns the intersection of economic, political and ethical thought with the financial institutions of medieval and Early Modern Italy. Currently he is reworking his thesis into a monograph Debt and the Republic: Economic Thought and Public Debt in Italy 1300–1550. His latest research article "Liberality as a Fiscal Problem in Medieval and Renaissance Thought: A Genealogy from Aristotle’s Tyrant to Machiavelli’s Prince" is forthcoming in The Journal of the History of Ideas. He is currently completing a co-edited volume with Gábor Almási on work ethics in medieval and Early Modern Europe for Palgrave Macmillan.

At the Italian Academy, he will be researching the relationship between fiscality and history writing in medieval and Early Modern Italy. This is a comparative research project that will be the basis for a second monograph entitled Fiscality and the Past.