Fabrizio Ansani

Fabrizio Ansani is a specialist in the history of late medieval war economy and military commodities. He earned his Ph.D. cum laude in Early Modern History from the Università degli Studi di Padova (2018), where he studied the innovations in artillery technology in Renaissance Florence. After being awarded a two-year postdoctoral fellowship by the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici (2018-2020), he returned to his alma mater to conduct research on the logistical challenge of fifteenth-century permanent armies (2020-2022). During the term, he was also the principal investigator for a departmental project on saltpetre trade, which was later awarded an additional research grant by the Associazione Italiana per la Ricerca in Storia Economica. This interest in the diplomacy of strategic materials has eventually led him to a successful application for a British Academy Newton International Fellowship with the University of Exeter (2023-2024). He is now working (2024-2027) with the ECOMEDS Team at King's College London to explore new primary sources and deepen my knowledge in the late medieval resources trade, territorialization processes, and material culture.

Fabrizio Ansani is interested in the complex history of the Italian Renaissance, with a particular focus on its material foundations and economic systems. Over the last six years, he studied the late medieval military industry to reassess the impact of conflicts on fifteenth-century society and state building, leading several projects on the 'revolutionary challenges' of artillery logistics and publishing a groundbreaking monograph on warhorse market and procurement. Such research helped him in developing an original methodology which combines economic history with military history, the history of technology and the history of art, agricultural history and animal history. He is now specializing in the trade in agricultural products, raw materials, and strategic commodities during the early modern period.