معرفی
Cinzia Grifoni is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Medieval Research (IMAF) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, where she leads the FWF project 'Margins at the Centre: Book Production and Practices of Annotation in the East Frankish Realm (ca. 830-900)'. She is also affiliated with the University of Vienna, where she regularly teaches courses on medieval society, politics, and culture. Her work spans multiple international collaborations including research groups in Cambridge, Oxford, Utrecht, Vienna, Poitiers, and Paris.
Grifoni earned her doctorate from the University of Udine in 2004 with a dissertation on 'Otfrido and the Weissenburg exegetical traditions in the Carolingian period,' following classical philology studies with a focus on Medieval Latin at the University of Florence (1994-1999). Her academic journey includes postdoctoral positions in major projects including VISCOM: Visions of Community, SCIRE: Social Cohesion, Identity and Religion in Europe, and Bible and Historiography in Transcultural Iberian Societies.
Her research focuses on early medieval history, Medieval Latin, cultural history, school production and biblical exegesis in the early medieval Latin West, scholarly networks and knowledge transfer in the Carolingian period, and ethnic terminology. Her work examines how biblical texts were annotated, commented upon, and transmitted in Carolingian Europe, with particular attention to the East Frankish realm. She has pioneered research on marginalia, glosses, and the material aspects of medieval manuscripts as windows into educational practices and intellectual networks.
Grifoni's scholarly output reveals consistent engagement with Carolingian educational practices, biblical commentary traditions, and the development of ethnic terminology in the early Middle Ages. Her recent work has increasingly focused on digital approaches to manuscript studies, including Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) models for Carolingian minuscule.
- Senior Postdoc-Programm Elise Richter, FWF (2021-2025)
- Back-to Research-Grant, University of Vienna (2019-2020)
- Doctoral scholarship, University of Udine (2001-2004)
Grifoni actively supervises research projects and collaborates with numerous PhD candidates through her FWF project 'Margins at the Centre.' She has received significant funding including the Elise Richter Senior Postdoc Program from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) for 2021-2025. Her research has been supported by multiple institutions including the University of Vienna, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and international collaborations across Europe.
She co-organizes the IMAFO Lab 'Shaping Knowledge in the Middle Ages. Texts, Manuscripts, Contexts' and has established important research networks including the 'Rethinking Carolingian Correctio' working group (Cambridge-Oxford-Utrecht-Vienna) and the 'Categorising the Church' working group (Poitiers-Vienna). Her current FWF project 'Margins at the Centre' represents a major research initiative examining book production and annotation practices in the East Frankish realm during the Carolingian period.
