PIMo Newsletter October 2022

With the new academic year well under way here in the Northern Hemisphere, the PIMo team are delighted to share details of upcoming events, as well as highlighting some of our exciting recent events, publications and research outputs.

We particularly want to flag the dates of the upcoming Annual Conference (24-27 May 2023) and the Management Committee Meeting (27 May), which will take place in Rabat, Morocco. This Management Committee Meeting will be the final one of this project so all MC members are strongly encouraged to attend and participate where possible. We will soon be issuing a Call for Papers for the conference, on the broad theme of Crossings, so do keep an eye on the PIMo website.

We would also like to draw your attention to the brand new Youtube Playlist, which compiles the many excellent videos produced by PIMo members and collaborators.
As ever, we encourage network members to actively participate in our activities where possible. Please continue to check out our website, which is regularly updated with information about our events, recent publications and funding opportunities, as well as the fascinating Visual Reflections produced by network members.

Wishing you all the best,
PIMo Core Team
Upcoming Events
Plans are afoot for several more events in the months to come, but for now the PIMo team would like to highlight the following:

Spanish and Italian Reformers: Networks, Letters, Memoirs, WG2 Workshop, University of Seville, January 19-20, 2023.
This event will discuss how sixteenth and seventeenth-century Italian and Spanish religionis causa exiles envisioned themselves, or constructed and promoted an idea of themselves, through their writings and ego-documents. Case studies range from Casiodoro de Reina, the Sevillian monk who first translated the Bible into Spanish, to the humanists Francisco de Enzinas and Celio Secondo Curione; from the noblewoman Isabella Breseña, to Juan Borgoñón; from Antonio del Corro and Bernardino Ochino, to the translator and propagandist Juan Pérez de Pineda; from the released North-African slave Prospero d’Imperatore, to the heterodox Italian émigrés Jacopo Aconcio and Francesco Pucci, among others. Full details and the programme can be found here: Seville Workshop.

The 4th PIMo Training School on Crossings, WG4, Rabat, 21-27 May, 2023.
The Crossings training school will offer a training package that includes cohort formation, networking, career development, academic and publishing training, production of public history and active engagement with societal partners. The call for participants with a detailed activities program will be announced soon and the final selection of participants will be announced in December 2022. We strive to accommodate excellent MA students pursuing a PhD position, PhD candidates and early Postdoctoral fellows, preferably from different academic backgrounds and places of origin.

Please keep an eye on the Events section of the PIMo website to stay up to date with forthcoming events.

Training Schools
PIMo is delighted to report its success in organising three major training school for graduate and early career researchers in the summer of 2022.

Working Group 2 held the Empires and Emotions. Rethinking Intellectual and Cultural Transfers /Translations in Southeastern Europe and the Mediterranean (15th-19th C.) Summer Training School at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Belgrade from 25th to 28 May 2022. The training school aimed to explore the “visible and invisible networks” between cultures, religions, and politics between the Mediterranean and the Hinterland and to show how such connections were artificially separated by political, ideological, and physical borders. With 23 graduate and early career researchers participating alongside the team of trainers, the Training School facilitated extensive exchange of knowledge and practices. The participants complimented the variety of the skills training offered, encompassing work on primary sources, discussions of digital humanities and much more. They also greatly appreciated the visits to Belgrade Fortress and the National Museum of Serbia. The Training School effectively explored and analysed the interaction between empires and emotions while also empowering its participants to go forth and generate new and path-breaking research in the field. The hosts, Professor Vladimir Simić and Professor Rastko Jović, as well as the whole organising team are to be commended for their contribution to this vital event.

Working Group 1 held the Moving Goods for Charity across the Mediterranean (15th–19th centuries)  Summer Training School at the Centro Studi sui Monti di Pietà in  Bologna, 13-16 June 2022. The training school brought together a range of graduate, early career researchers, and expert trainers to consider and analyse the evolving nature of charitable exchanges across the Mediterranean space. The participants engaged with material from the Archivio Storico del Monte di Pietà di Bologna, honing their skills in the analysis of text and material culture. Their research underlined the centrality of the emotion invested in the objects and texts produced by charitable enterprise while also exploring the complex and shifting relationships between solidarity and charity across time and space. The participants were able to trace the evolution of both the institutions and the practices governing charity in the region not only through texts but also through the objects themselves, underlining the importance of material culture to the historian. We are grateful to the Centro Studi sui Monti di Pietà for hosting this workshop and to the conveners Giovanni Tarantino, Marta Bucholc (PIMo Training Schools Coordinator), Rosita D’Amora, Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli and Mauro Carboni.

Working Group 3 held the Paper in Motion: Restoration, Conservation, Transmediation Summer Training School at the Arnamagnæan Institute Copenhagen between 31 August and 3 September 2022. This training school brought together an international and interdisciplinary group of trainees and trainers that included experts in the history of paper production, early modern cultural history, restoration, conservation as well as specialists in the transformation of manuscript texts into interactive digital texts in electronic format. The school took all of them on a tour which went from seminars on the origins and methods of paper production and distribution, approaches to its role as the medium that pervaded European modernity, to two fascinating hands-on workshops: in the first of them trainees produced their own paper using traditional techniques that go back for centuries, and in the second both trainers and trainees learned some basic notions of how to transcribe manuscript primary sources into electronic texts using the protocols of the Text Encoding Initiative (https://tei-c.org/) and Extensible Markup Language (XML). We are grateful to the Arnamagnaean Institute for hosting this event and to the convenors Giovanni Tarantino, José María Pérez Fernández, Marta Bucholc and Matthew Driscoll.
Recent Events 
As ever, the PIMo team has been very busy and productive over the last few months, hosting events, supporting publications, and sharing research on our website.


The Third Annual PIMo Conference on the theme of European Sea Spaces and Histories of Knowledge took place in Helsinki and Tallinn on June 22-23, 2022. With a wide-ranging programme integrating a diverse range of scholars and specialisms, the conference offered a rich and nuanced analysis of he uneven chronologies and modalities that frame the historiographies of the Mediterranean, the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the North Sea, the inland or epeiric seas of Europe. The engaging and fruitful discussions that defined the conference will undoubtedly leave their mark on scholarship in the field in years to come. The participants and the broader PIMo team are very grateful to the hosts Tommaso Giordani of the University of Tallinn and Stefan Nygård of the University of Helsinki, as well as the organisers, Luisa Simonutti, Giovanni Tarantino and Henning Trüper, for all their hard work in making this event so successful.


Working Group 2 organised the workshop Travelling Matters: Rereading, Reshaping, Reusing Objects Across The Mediterranean at the Haifa Centre for Mediterranean History on September 08 2022. This event brought together a range of scholars to analyse the role of objects as sources that can unlock complex and multilayered histories of mobility and exchange across the Mediterranean. It also engaged with the new meanings imbued in objects through the processes of travel and exchange, underlining the transformative potential of mobility not just for people and for ideas but also for material culture. The participants greatly enjoyed the event, which offered an opportunity to share ideas and practices. We are grateful to the hosts and organisers for facilitating this stimulating event. We are grateful to the hosts at the Haifa Centre for Mediterranean History and to the organisers Cedric Cohen-Skalli, Rosita D’Amora, José Maria Pérez Fernández, Zur Shalev and Giovanni Tarantino.


Working Group 4 hosted a workshop on the theme of Connections of the Past and the Future: the Academic Knowledge of Human Movement in the Mediterranean Region and Beyond. The event hosted by NGO Diversity Development Group” took place on September 23 2022 in Vilnius (Lithuania). It focused on the connections and differences of the human movement and issues related to this phenomenon in the Mediterranean region and beyond from the 15th century to the present day. Academics and practitioners working in the field of migration were invited to discuss the resonance of the past events to these days, as well as what could be learnt from the past and applied in practice today and in the future.  We are grateful for scholars Giacomo Orsini (Ghent university, Belgium), Umar Ryad (University of Leuven, Belgium), Joanna Musiatewicz (University of Warsaw, Poland), Catherine Wilson (Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands) and Andrius Marcinkevičius (Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences, Lithuania) for sharing their knowledge and insights. This stimulating and inter-disciplinary workshop is testament to PIMo’ s commitment to ongoing reflection on migration phenomena, past and present.


PIMo was delighted to help co-host and co-organise, in partnership with the University of Florence and the European University Institute, the 3rd Biennial Conference of the Society of the History of Emotions in Florence, 30 August-02 September, on the theme of Going Places: Mobility, Migration, Exile, Space and Emotions. The conference offered an extremely rich programme, with contributions from several PIMo researchers. A particular highlight was the dance performance, Territori del Gesto: Ode Barbara, jointly presented by the PIMo COST Action and the University of Florence. This striking and moving piece was inspired by the research of the PIMo network and represented a novel and accessible means of communicating our interests and findings to a broad public. You can read more about the performance here.
Recent Publications
The PIMo network has continued to support the publication of new research and to host contributions from PIMo members on the PIMo website.

2022 has seen the publication of two edited volumes and a journal article from research generated through or enhanced by the knowledge exchange at the heart of the PIMo network.


Rereading Travellers to the East: Shaping Identities and Building the Nation in Post-unification Italy, ed. by Beatrice Falucci, Emanuele Giusti and Davide Trentacoste, (Florence University Press, Florence, 2022).
Rereading Travellers focuses on the rereadings to which early modern travel literature about Asia has been subjected by different actors involved in the political, economic, cultural and intellectual life of post-unification Italy. The authors highlight how this literature has been reinterpreted and reused for political and ideological purposes in the context of the formation and reformation of collective identities, from the Risorgimento to the Fascist regime and the early republic. By showing the potential of the notion of rereading, the volume outlines a history of the political and cultural legacy of travel literature which goes well beyond Italy. The book is available in Open Access here: https://books.fupress.com/catalogue/rereading-travellers-to-the-east/11749

Giovanni Tarantino, ‘The Sky in Place of The Nile’: Climate, Religious Unrest and Scapegoating in Post-Tridentine Apulia,’ Environment and History, 28:3, (2022), 491-511.

This article investigates how extremely adverse climatic and weather conditions in early modern southern Italy played a part in disrupting social coexistence among groups and individuals of different confessions and beliefs in what until then had been top-down sanctioned or tolerated multi-confessional communities. It focuses on the dramatic fate of the Waldensian colonies in Calabria and Apulia, and the little-studied case of witchcraft panic that broke out in the town of Bitonto in 1593. By examining different ways of dealing with environmental crises (rogatory processions, apocalyptic scapegoating, witchcraft panics), the article contributes to a history of intolerance from the ‘inside out’.

Article available here: https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/whp/eh/2022/00000028/00000003/art00011;jsessionid=9t4oo8b0k9pr8.x-ic-live-03?fbclid=IwAR1eoI-qXvWjuvprjm_H6mHAISA9mCGaVrOGhkf5RYuxHUMBfy3ykE9eA8U

La carta e il Mediterraneo: produzione, commercio, comunicazione, eds Livia Faggioni & Mauro Mussolin (Fabriano: Fondazione Fedrigoni Fabriano, 2022)

It would have been hard to find a better framework for a volume developing from PIMo research on “paper in motion” than the book series published by the Fondazione Fedrigoni Fabriano, an institution which represents a city and an industrial activity with a tradition of centuries. The historical weight and cultural relevance of Fabriano turn it into an iconic location for the history of paper in Europe which is hard to match. This edited volume offers a rich and detailed history of paper in the Mediterranean space and is sure to become a vital resource for scholars in the field.

Over the course of the summer the PIMo website has hosted three fascinating Visual Reflections from members of our research network. These offer brief but tantalising snapshots into the kind of research PIMo members are conducting and also highlight yet another way in which our COST Action facilitates knowledge exchange and dissemination. They can be accessed here:

Dónal Hassett, The Ile Sainte Marguerite: Geographies of Repression and Incarceration in the Colonial Mediterranean

Andreas Isler, Wandering Images: A Dervish and his Garb

Marco Fratini, From Exile to Revenge: The Return of the Waldensians of Piedmont to Their Valleys in a Late-Seventeenth-Century Map

If you are interested in contributing to the Visual Reflection series, which offers great platform for short, engaging texts on material and visual culture, please contact the series editor, Paola von Wyss-Giacosa.

Finally, we are delighted to have established a partnership with the Horizon Research Network Ithaca, led by Professor Matteo Al Kalak. ITHACA: Interconnecting Histories and Archives for  Migrant Agency aims to analyse migrations from the Middle Ages to the present day, within a rigorous historical framework.

The PIMo Core group thanks all the members for their contuined support and enthusiasm. We will, of course, keep you up to date with our activities and share calls for the various upcoming events, including the Training School and the Conference in Rabat. We would again encourage all MC members to travel to and participate in the Rabat MC meeting where possible.

Thanks and best wishes,
PIMo Core Group