This is another of our conversations on Intellectual humility and historical thinking.
Today’s guest is William Caferro. He is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. He studies medieval European history, specializing in Italy. His research focuses on economic, military, social, literary and historiographical trends. Caferro is the author of Mercenary Companies and the Decline of Siena (Johns Hopkins, 1998); John Hawkwood, English Mercenary in Fourteenth Century Italy (Johns Hopkins, 2006), which won the Otto Grundler Prize from the International Medieval Congress (2008); Contesting the Renaissance (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); and Petrarch’s War: Florence and the Black Death in Context (Cambridge, 2018), which won a book prize from the American Association of Italian Studies (AAIS). He is co-author of The Spinelli: Fortunes of a Renaissance Family (Penn State, 2001), co-editor of The Unbounded Community: Papers in Christian Ecumenism in Honor of Jaroslav Pelikan (Routledge, 1996) and editor of The Routledge History of the Renaissance (Routledge, 2017). His most recent book is Teaching History.
As is always the case with these conversations, and unlike more typical conversations on the podcast, we will be following a set format of questions…though we reserve the right to wander off the set path.
For Further Investigation
This is Bill’s third appearance on the podcast. We talked in Episode 103 about Petrarch’s War, and in Episode 214 about how to ask good historical questions.
