Marco Formisano

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Gunpowder and the book: the art of war in Europe from the 4th through the 16th centuries

2008-2009

Marco Formisano completed his undergraduate studies in Classics in Palermo (Italy) and in Paris (Université de Paris VII, Jussieu) and received his PhD from the University of Palermo. After graduating and before starting the doctorate, he was awarded a fellowship which allowed him to go to Berlin as a visiting student at the Freie Universität: this marked the beginning of a close connection with Germany that continues to this day. Since then he has won various grants that have allowed me to spend long periods of time in Germany (Berlin, Hamburg), in the US (Brown, Yale, NYU) and in the UK as a Frances Yates Fellow at Warburg Institute. Currently he has a position as Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the Cooperative Research Center (SFB) "Transformations of Antiquity" at the Humboldt Universität in Berlin. His areas of interest are ancient technical writing; late antiquity; art of war; classical tradition in the Renaissance; martyrological literature (esp. Perpetua); panegyric; autobiography; literary theory; marginal texts. He published a monograph on late Roman technical literature ("Tecnica e scrittura", Rome 2001), an edition of Vegetius’ Epitoma rei militaris (Milan, 2003) and of the Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis (Milan 2008) and is co-editor of a collection of papers with the title "Perpetua’s Passions. Pluridisciplinary Approaches to the Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis (with J. N. Bremmer, Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2009) and of another on "War in Words. Die Transformationen des Krieges von der Antike bis zur Frühneuzeit (with H. Böhme, De Gruyter Verlag, forthcoming 2009). Currently he is working on another monograph on the art of war in antiquity and in the Renaissance.