About

Paolo Squatriti is a Professor of Italian in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. He holds a Ph.D. from Virginia, obtained in 1990. His research focuses on the transition from Roman hegemony to early medieval European cultural and political fragmentation, examining this transformation in Mediterranean and Italian history from a rural perspective. He aims to reconstruct what happened on the ground when a large bureaucratic imperial state collapsed and several successor societies emerged. His work includes analyzing how stateless, non-capitalist societies managed essential resources such as water. Recently, he has been engaged with forest history, investigating how woodlands changed in extent, situation, and composition during the first millennium AD, and how these changes affected human culture.

Research topics

• Cartography
• Humanities
• Archaeology
• History
• Geography
• Ancient history
• Art

Selected publications

• <i>Les mondes ruraux de l’Ouest de la France au Moyen Âge: Société, pouvoirs, habitats</i> , ed. Pierre-Yves Laffont, Julien Bachelier, Samuel Chollet and Jean-Claude Meuret

  The English Historical Review · 2026-04-09

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• 26.03.09 Jasperse, Jitske, ed., The Social Lives of Medieval Rings.

  Indiana Magazine of History (Indiana University) · 2026-03-11

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Review: <i>The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages</i> , by Shane Bobrycki

  Studies in Late Antiquity · 2026-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• De la grêle et du tonnerre: Histoire médiévale des imaginaires paysans, by Jean-Pierre Devroey

  The English Historical Review · 2025-04-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• :<i>Selve oscure e alberi strani: I boschi nell’Italia di Dante</i>

  Speculum · 2025-03-28

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Rivers and Waterways

  2024-01-31

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  Pre-modern Europe’s water behaved much as it had for millennia: it remained unstable. But the interaction between the growing numbers of enterprising Europeans, climatic change, and the instability natural to the hydrological cycle in a geographically heterogeneous Europe, conferred special dynamism on waterways’ history. Between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries, Europe’s watery environments changed more, and more quickly, than they had for a long time. Monastic and urban communities had a large hand in regulating flows to suit economic and cultural interests, but peasant labour was another decisive agent. Drainage, flood control, irrigation, domestic and industrial waste disposal, and the channelling of waters for pre-modern manufacturing processes created new balances between wet and dry portions of western Eurasia. They also conferred on flowing waters new chemical and physical qualities that affected aquatic environments and the plants and animals living around streams and rivers. A more humanised waterscape emerged.

  PublisherDOI

• :<i>Commerce et marchandisation du bois à Toulouse à la fin du Moyen Âge</i>

  Speculum · 2023-12-20

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• Introduction

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022-06-02

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• The Worst of Weeds

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022-06-02

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In Frankish Europe, some “herbs” seemed more consistently evil than others. This is evident in a curious poem in an anonymous collection of lyrics from the ninth century (judging by the sole manuscript’s handwriting) that recounts the pleasures and dangers of an incongruous pair, navigation and agriculture. The poem is didactic, so uses a large number of obscure, technical Latin words for the benefit of learners.

  PublisherDOI

• Epilogue: Sorting Weeds Out

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022-06-02

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Suggests that the effort to order nature and fit plants into categories was an important aspect of Carolingian culture, inducing the literate to engage with and understand environments and ecological processes.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Deborah Mauskopf Deliyannis

  3 shared

• Hendrik Dey

  3 shared

• Roberta J. Magnusson

  University of Oklahoma

  2 shared

• Colin Rynne

  1 shared

• Harry B. Evans

  1 shared

• Thomas F. Glick

  1 shared

• Richard Holt

  1 shared

• Benjamin Graham

  1 shared