Rita Costa-Gomes, Ph.D.

Biography

A historian of Medieval Portugal with strong interests in Iberian and Mediterranean history, Costa Gomes published a monograph about the royal court of Portugal, two volumes on the history of the Portuguese frontiers, the biography of king Fernando I of Portugal (r. 1367-1383), the annotated edition of the 15th-century letter collection of Abbot Gomes Eanes. She was Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute (Florence), Research Fellow at the Newberry Library (Chicago), FLAD/Biblioteca Nacional (Portugal), and at the Folger Library (Washington, D.C.). Some of her recent publications are available at www.academia.edu.

Her most recent book is an annotated edition of the letters of Gomes Eanes, a Portuguese who lived for three decades in Italy and was head of the Badia Fiorentina (Monastery of Santa Maria of Florence) between 1419 and 1439. It includes the transcribed 550 original missives he received, currently kept in two Florentine archives (Biblioteca Laurenziana, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale). The texts provide a detailed record of the abbot’s activities and of his constant communication with men and women living in Italy, Portugal, and other parts of Europe, revealing a multilingual cultural world and a wide field of human relations. The book includes an introductory study of the abbot and his career, of the origins and evolution of the letter collection within the intellectual and institutional context of the Benedictine abbey, and of letterwriting as a cultural practice in Portuguese and Italian societies. A general index of the missives closes the volume. [ISBN 978 88 222 6516 6]

Selected Publications

Costa Gomes, Rita. A Portuguese Abbot in Renaissance Florence. The Letter Collection of Gomes Eanes (1415-1463), Florence: Olshki, 2017.

Costa Gomes, Rita. The Making of a Court Society: Kings and Nobles in Late Medieval Portugal, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Recent Book Reviews

“Stéphane Péquignot, Au Nom du Roi. Pratique Diplomatique et Pouvoir durant le Règne de Jacques II d’Aragon (1291-1327), Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2009”, forthcoming in the American Historical Review
“María Narbona Cárceles, La Corte de Carlos III el Noble, rey de Navarra: espacio doméstico y escenario del poder, 1376-1415, Pamplona: Barañáin Navarra (EUNSA), 2006”, Francia-online, 2009-2.
(in collaboration with Olga Bettencourt) “Review article: Publications on the Portuguese Earthquake of 1755”, Bulletin of the Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Study 33/2 (2008), 30-33.

Recent Lectures and Presentations

“The Spatial Turn and Un-archived Histories” at the Workshop “Un-archived Histories” organized by the History Department, Emory University, 2011.
“Cultural Exchanges between Africa and Iberia in the late 1400s”, at the Conference “Contact and Exchange in Medieval Europe”, St John’s College, Oxford, 2010.
“Alfarrobeira: The Death of the Tyrant?”, at the International Conference on “Death at Court”, Greifswald University (Germany), 2010.
“A Lost City in the Early Atlantic: Ribeira Grande (Cape Verde) before Drake’s Conquest” at the 41st Annual Meeting of the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, Ottawa (Canada) , 2010.

Awards and Honors

Research Grant FLAD/Biblioteca Nacional at the National Library of Portugal, Fall 2011
Audrey Lumsden-Kouvel Fellow at the Newberry Library, Chicago, 2009.
Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute, Italy, 2002

Teaching

HIST 410: The Dawn of Europe in Twenty Five Images