Vita
Filippo Petricca is Assistant Professor of Italian literature at Indiana University Bloomington. Trained in Romance philology, he is a comparative scholar of the literary imagination investigating the relationship between Italian and French late medieval fiction and economics, as well as periodization and the concept of modernity. His research examines how, in a period of increasing monetization and expansion of commerce, fiction shaped debates concerning economic categories such as debt, value, and exchange. Recent publications analyze not only explicit economic themes in literary texts, but also the presence of economic concepts in realms that are apparently non-economic.
They include an essay on Dante Alighieri’s conception of money, and two articles on the medieval reception of the Biblical story of Joseph in medieval Chartres and on divine money and currency manipulation in the fourteenth-century Roman de Fauvel. He is currently completing his first monograph on Dante and economics.
Affiliated Project 2025-26
Petricca’s research examines how medieval literary works interact with economic theories and practices. In medieval fiction, authors and characters engage with scales to explore virtuous ways of spending resources, avoiding waste, and maximizing profit—ultimately, to reflect on social justice within and beyond the marketplace.
Fictional works, he shows, join theological debates on measurement and simultaneously refashion everyday measuring practices, including the process of assaying the fineness of monetary units. More broadly, scales contribute to accounting not only for the value of things, but also for the value of fiction.