Carolyn James

Biography

Carolyn James has taught early modern Italian and European History at Monash University since 2001. Her research has focused on the history of letter-writing in Europe c. 1350-1600, especially by women, and on female participation in politics in the court societies of northern Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Italian epistolary sources have informed her studies of premodern marriage. With Antonio Pgliaro she translated the remarkable late medieval letters of Margherita Datini, wife of Francesco Datini, the so-called merchant of Prato made famous by Iris Origo’s popular biography. She is now engaged in a social and cultural history of the Italian Wars of the first half of the sixteenth century with Professor Susan Broomhall and Dr Lisa Mansfield.