Antonio Pattori

Research Topic

Conspiracies and Regime Change in sixteenth-century Italy

Supervisor: Filippo de Vivo

My primary interests lie in the interconnected political, cultural, and intellectual history of Early Modern Europe, with particular attention to Italy. I focus on sixteenth-century political conspiracies, and their wider transnational political and diplomatic role. My doctoral thesis combines these interests by analysing the foreign-promoted spread of political conspiracies within mid-sixteenth-century Italy, and their use as a tool for geopolitical change. More specifically, I am fascinated by the interaction of popular politics and diplomacy, and the attempts made to persuade local populations to support regime change. I am also interested in how leading contemporary Italian thinkers thought about conspiracies, both in abstract terms as well as in their analysis of specific political plots.

My research is generously funded by the Oxford Graduate Scholarship in History and University College, Oxford.

I graduated with a BA in History from St Hugh’s College, Oxford (2022), with a dissertation supervised by Professor David Parrott on the implementations of 'Reason of State' theories in the Duchy of Parma in the early seventeenth century. In 2023, I completed an MSt in Early Modern History at New College, Oxford, with a dissertation supervised by Professor Filippo de Vivo, analysing the transnational and cultural implications of two political conspiracies in 1547, respectively in Genoa and Piacenza. 

I am the co-convenor of the Early Modern Diplomacy Seminar (c.1400-1800). For more information, or to present a paper, please email me. I also co-lead an interdisciplinary and comparative project on early modern cryptography. Along with mathematicians and Digital Humanities experts, we use digital methods to compare the effectiveness of encoding practices employed by different European states, as well as to reconstruct lost cypher keys and break cyphered diplomatic correspondence.

Teaching:

I teach a course on Italian Late Medieval and Early Modern Palaeography (1400-1800) for final year undergraduates and master's students. I also help with teaching an undergraduate special subject course on Politics, Art, and Culture in the Italian Renaissance: Venice and Florence, 1475-1525.