Mattia Corso

Mattia Corso is a research fellow at the University of Roma Tre, working on the ERC-funded project HolyLab  – A global economic organization in the early modern period: The Custody of the Holy Land through its account books (1600-1800) (Grant Agreement ID 101001857), led by Prof. Felicita Tramontana. The project investigates the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land and its Commissariats – a transnational network of alms collecting institutions – during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

He received his PhD from the University of Padua in 2020 with a dissertation exploring the transition between pre- and post-Tridentine Catholicism through the lens of everyday religious experience in the sixteenth-century Republic of Venice. His research interests lie at the intersection of religious history and material culture, with publications addressing topics such as the use of blessed candles in exorcisms and deathbed rituals, the embodied experience of sin shaped by indulgence rituals, and the reform of audience behaviour at Mass in the late sixteenth century.

As part of HolyLab, Mattia’s current research examines the creation of a distinctive type of Agnus Dei, crafted by the Franciscans in their monasteries in Jerusalem and Bethlehem using soil from the holy places, as well as the transnational circulation of indulgenced objects through the network of the Commissariats.