Paolo Chiesa

Career

Chiesa graduated from the University of Milan in 1980, tutored by Giovanni Orlandi, and received a doctorate in Medieval Latin Studies from the University of Florence in 1987. In 1992 he was appointed associate professor at the University of Udine, and was promoted to Full professorship in 2000. In 2006, he moved back to Milan.

As of 2025, he is founding member of the Accademia Ambrosiana (Class of Greek and Latin Studies) and full member of the Istituto Lombardo, as well as a correspondent of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (since 2014) and of the Accademia dei Lincei (since 2024), and a member of several scientific boards, including SISMEL and the Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medioevo. He is the editor of the scientific journal Filologia mediolatina, published by SISMEL and the Fondazione Ezio Franceschini.

Research activity

Chiesa specialized in Latin texts of the Middle Ages and on theory of textual criticism and stemmatic. He identified an autograph manuscript of the diplomat Liutprand of Cremona and published the critical edition of his works for the Corpus Christianorum. In 2009 he re-edited Liutpand's Antapodosis with facing Italian translation for the Collezione Lorenzo Valla; for the same series, he edited the description of Milan by Bonvesin da la Riva and the Itinerarium by William of Rubruck and translated the Ecclesiastical History of the English People by Bede (based on the critical text established by Michael Lapidge). He also translated Liutprand's pamphlet on Pope John XII and the Life of Charlemagne by Einhard. With Lucia Castaldi, he edited five volumes on the textual transmission of Medieval Latin texts. He also worked on Medieval translations from Greek to Latin and published a Medieval dossier about St Amphilochius of Iconium, attributing it to Anastasius Bibliothecarius.

In 2013, he edited and translated the Monarchia by Dante and in 2022 he co-edited a volume on Dante's Latin. Chiesa also studied the Regula Pastoralis by Pope Gregory the Great and argued that a Medieval manuscript of this work, now held in Troyes, might have been produced under Gregory's own supervision. In 2024, he published the first edition of Galvano Fiamma's Cronica universalis, containing the earliest known mention of the American continent in European literature (ca. two hundred and fifty years before Columbus).

Chiesa wrote an introduction to textual criticism, a casebook of philology of Latin texts of the Middle Ages, a survey of Latin literature of the Middle Ages and a handbook on textual transmission of Latin texts. In 2008 he co-edited Giovanni Orlandi's scripta minora and in 2017 a Gedenkschrift in the tenth anniversary of Orlandi's passing.