Caroline Castiglione’s research has uncovered how seemingly marginalized individuals were able to challenge the systems of power that in theory left them without a voice. By focusing on rarely utilized village archives or the underestimated resistance of Roman women, she has furthered our understanding of the ways that marginalized groups used both written protests and non-violent judicial means to defy the limits placed on their lives.  In both teaching and research, she emphasizes the gradual and collective elements of this process and the forgotten individuals who contributed to it.  Her first book, Patrons and Adversaries: Nobles and Villagers in Italian Politics, 1640-1760 (Oxford University Press, 2005) won the Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize from the Society for Italian Historical Studies in 2006. Her book, Accounting for Affection: Mothering and Politics in Rome, 1630-1730 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) examines the figure of the mater litigans or litigating mother, whose activities illustrate the symbiotic evolution of politics and mothering in early modern Rome.  Current research interests include the political thought of the Venetian writer Moderata Fonte, about whom she has written an article for the forthcoming volume, Challenging Women’s Agency and Activism in Early Modernity, edited by Merry Wiesner-Hanks.  Together with co-author Suzanne Scanlan, she received the 2017 Best Article Prize for Volume 11 (2016-17) of Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal for article, for “Death Did Not Become Her:  Unconventional Women and the Problem of Female Commemoration in Early Modern Rome,” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 11.2 (2017): 59-92.

Caroline Castiglione’s research has uncovered how seemingly marginalized individuals were able to challenge the systems of power that in theory left them without a voice. By focusing on rarely utilized village archives or the underestimated resistance of Roman women, she has furthered our understanding of the ways that marginalized groups used both written protests and non-violent judicial means to defy the limits placed on their lives.  In both teaching and research, she emphasizes the gradual and collective elements of this process and the forgotten individuals who contributed to it.

Social, cultural, and political intersections shape her research – places, practices, and texts in which contradictions and transgressions in meaning among historical actors suggest the complexity of the past.  In Patrons and Adversaries, this multifaceted approach revealed the diversity of actors who jostled for control of the Roman countryside.   Villagers defended their rights through the strategies she called "adversarial literacy," practices that ranged from mastery of their constitutions to debates in the village assembly, from dragging their feet in the payment of dues to dragging their lords into papal courts. In its later manifestations, adversarial literacy involved villagers writing and interpreting sources for themselves in order to challenge the monopoly on text-making claimed by ruling elites in Rome. A lost world of increasingly savvy villagers, irate nobles, and exasperated bureaucrats is analyzed to illustrate how villagers challenged who controlled the rural world. 

A similarly eclectic approach in Accounting for Affection uncovered the symbiotic evolution of politics and mothering in early modern Rome.   Through an examination of a range of maternal sources -- women's legal activities, their letters, and their daily routines of caring for children -- Castiglione mapped the intersection of maternal affection, female advocacy, and family conflict in the papal city.  The figure of the litigating mother, or the mater litigans became a fixture in seventeenth-century Rome.  She challenged the assumptions of dynastic politics; her practices included petition-writing and lawsuits; her assertions of the centrality of women’s contributions to the aristocratic family challenged the male authorities to whom she was supposed to pledge her deference and allegiance.  Castiglione’s multifaceted approach to the sources uncovers a nuanced domestic sphere, infused by contemporary controversies including the debates over probabilism, a contested system of Jesuit ethics and quietism, later declared heretical.  Even as physicians extended their reach into the nursery, women remained primarily responsible nonetheless for the survival of their offspring, a role that fueled their stature in the family.  Accounting for Affection reveals that some men, increasingly ambivalent about the demands of the dynastic aristocratic family, became reluctant allies in a newer configuration of the family that acknowledged a greater sphere for women and a greater autonomy for children to decide upon their future.

Subsequent research on women in Rome has expanded her interests to include the difficulties of commemorating women whose lives broke the boundaries of acceptability.  Her article co-authored with Suzanne Scanlan, “Death Did Not Become Her: Unconventional Women and the Problem of Female Commemoration in Early Modern Rome,” won the Best Article Prize (2016-17) from Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal.  She has continued to mine issues of women and infant health in the early modern period in two articles, “What to Expect When You’re Always Expecting:  Frequent Childbirth and Female Health in Early Modern Italy,” and “Peasants at the Palace:  Wet Nurses and Aristocratic Mothers in Early Modern Rome.”

Current research interests include the political thought of the Venetian writer Moderata Fonte, about whom she has written an article for the forthcoming volume, Challenging Women’s Agency and Activism in Early Modernity, edited by Merry Wiesner-Hanks. 

2020   Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Grant

2019    Franklin Grant, American Philosophical Society

2019    Social Science Research Institute Award Seed Funding Award, Brown

2017    Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award (for spring 2018)

2015     Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Grant (summer 2015)

2013    Faculty Fellowship, Cogut Center for the Humanities (fall 2013)

2012    Wendy J. Strothman Faculty Research Award in the Humanities 2012-13, Brown University

2012    CAP fellow awarded for 2012-2013

2011     Curricular Grant, Brown University

2009-2010   American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship

2009-2010   Howard Foundation Fellowship

2007    Salomon Award, Brown University

2006  Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize from the Society for Italian Historical Studies (for Patrons and Adversaries: Nobles and Villagers in Italian Politics, 1640-1760)

2004    Summer Research Assignment, University of Texas at Austin

2003  Prize for Excellence in Writing Instruction, University of Texas at Austin

2002     Texas Humanities Institute Fellow, University of Texas

2002     Travel Grant, Office of the Dean, College of Liberal Arts, University of Texas

2001   Dean’s Fellowship, College of Liberal Arts, University of Texas

2001   Special Research Grant, University of Texas

2000   Research Grant, University of Texas

2000   Proposal Award, Office of the Dean, College of Liberal Arts, Univ. of Texas

1999    American Council of Learned Societies

1999    Gladys Krieble Delmas Fellow

1999    Faculty Research Assignment, University of Texas

1999    Special Research Grant, University of Texas

Books:

Accounting for Affection: Mothering and Politics in Early Modern Rome. Early Modern History  Series: Society and Culture, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Patrons and Adversaries: Nobles and Villagers in Italian Politics, 1640-1760. New York:  Oxford University Press, 2005.  Awarded the Marraro Prize from the Society  for Italian Historical Studies, 2006.

Articles:

2017  Co-author, with Suzanne Scanlan, “Death Did Not Become Her: Unconventional Women and the Problem of Female Commemoration in Early Modern Rome,” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 11.2 (2017): 59-92.  Awarded Best Article Prize for Volume 11 (2016-17). 

2017  “What to Expect When You’re Always Expecting:  Frequent Childbirth and Female Health in Early Modern Italy,” in Conserving Health in Early Modern Culture: Bodies and Environments in Italy and England, ed. Sandra Cavallo and Tessa Storey (Manchester University Press: Social History of Medicine Series, 2017), 55-79. 

2015  “Culture of Peoples,” in Oxford Handbook of Early Modern History, c. 1350-1750, ed. Hamish Scott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015; reprint, 2018), 694-719.

2013  “Peasants at the Palace:  Wet Nurses and Aristocratic Mothers in Early Modern Rome,” in Medieval and Renaissance Lactations –Images, Rhetorics, Practices, ed. Jutta Sperling (Burlington, Vt.,: Ashgate, 2013; New York: Routledge, 2016), 79-99. 

2009a  “Mater litigans: Mothering Resistance in Early Eighteenth-Century Rome,” Historical Reflections /Réflexions Historiques  35.1 (2009): 6-27.

2009b  “To Trust is Good but Not to Trust is Better: An Aristocratic Woman in Search of Social Capital in Seventeenth-Century Rome,” in Sociability and its Discontents: Civil Society, Social Capital, and their Alternatives in Late-Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Nicholas A. Eckstein and Nicholas Terpstra (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2009), 149-170. 

2009c  “The Politics of Mercy: Village Petitions and a Noblewoman’s Justice in the Roman Countryside in the Eighteenth Century,” in Empowering Interactions: Political Cultures and the Emergence of the State in Europe, 14^th-19^th centuries, ed. Wim Blockmans, André Holenstein, and Jon Mathieu in collaboration with Daniel Schläppi (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2009), 79-90. 

2008  “When a Woman “Takes” Charge: Marie-Anne de la Trémoille and the End of the Patrimony of the Dukes of Bracciano,” Viator 39.2 (2008): 363-380. 

2007  “Mothers and Children,” in The Renaissance World, ed. John Martin (New York: Routledge, 2007), 381-97.

2005  “Extravagant Pretensions:  Aristocratic Family Conflicts, Emotion, and the ‘Public Sphere’ in Early Eighteenth-Century Rome,” Journal of Social History 38.3 (2005): 685-703.

2004  “Adversarial Literacy: How Peasant Politics Influenced Noble Governing of the Roman Countryside during the Early Modern Period,” American Historical Review 109 (2004): 783-804.

2001  “Political Culture in Seventeenth-Century Italian Villages,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History XXXI (2001): 523-552.

2000  “Accounting for Affection: Battles between Aristocratic Mothers and Sons in Eighteenth-Century Rome,” Journal of Family History XXV (2000): 405-431.

2017   Best Article Prize for Volume 11 (2016-17) of Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal for article, co-authored with Suzanne Scanlan, “Death Did Not Become Her:  Unconventional Women and the Problem of Female Commemoration in Early Modern Rome,” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 11.2 (2017): 59-92.

2006  Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize from the Society for Italian Historical Studies (for Patrons and Adversaries: Nobles and Villagers in Italian Politics, 1640-1760)

2003  Prize for Excellence in Writing Instruction, University of Texas at Austin

American Historical Association

Society for Italian Historical Studies

Renaissance Society of America

American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender

Caroline Castiglione teaches history courses (cross-listed in Italian Studies and History) that cover the history of Italy and Europe between the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.  She has also taught courses that examine legal evidence (Truth on Trial) and has in preparation a course on Women, Gender, and Feminism in Italy (fall 2020).  She has a longstanding interest in undergraduate and graduate student writing. 

Her graduate teaching includes courses on microhistory and gender.