Stefania Pastore

Stefania Pastore is Associate Professor of early modern History and European Renaissance History at The Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa.

Since 2007 she is a Tenured Assistant Professor (Ricercatore universitario) in Early Modern History at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. She obtained her M.A. degree (laurea) in Philosophy and her Ph.D. in Early Modern History, both from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.

She have been awarded Fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, the Harvard Centre for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti, Florence; the University of Wisconsin-Madison; the Newberry Library, Chicago; and many others European Institutions. She have given lectures and seminars at Yale University, Cornell University, Columbia and Princeton University as well as at the Institute for Advanced Study, and many other Spanish and Italian University and Institutions. Prior to coming to Scuola Normale Superiore, where she teach courses on Renaissance and Reformation Europe, global history, early modern Spain and Spanish Empire, she taught Spanish Literature, History and Culture at the University of Rome-La Sapienza (Facoltà di Scienze Umanistiche).

Her leading interest has always been the cultural and religious history of late medieval and early modern Spain. Her first book, Il vangelo e la spada. L’Inquisizione di Castiglia e i suoi critici (1460-1598), Rome: Storia e Letteratura, 2003, [The Gospel and the Sword: The Inquisition of Castile and its Critics, 1460-1598], is the result of extensive research in Spanish archives and libraries. It attempts to provide a new reading of the history of the Inquisition and of its impact on Spanish society, by focusing on points of friction and dissent and of cultural, theological, and jurisdictional resistance to the establishment and operation of the tribunal. It also presents a detailed history of the hitherto-ignored subject of possible alternatives to the royal Inquisition.

In her second book, Una herejía española. Conversos, alumbrados e Inquisición, Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2010 [Un'eresia spagnola: spiritualità conversa, alumbradismo e Inquisizione (1449-1559)] [A Spanish Heresy: Conversos, Alumbrados and the Inquisition, 1449-1559], she offer a new reading of the religious, cultural and intellectual history of Spain between the second half of the 15th and the first half of the 16th century in the light of the various relationships and clashes occasioned by the transformation of Spain from a country with three cultures and three religions to a country with a single religious denomination.

In numerous articles she have dealt with different subjects ranging from gender history and the relationship between women and power in early 16th-century Spain, to urban and genealogical history, the history of the Company of Jesus in the Hispanic context, and the more general issue of the different historical memories of Spain.