As a cultural historian of Medieval Europe, Melissa Vise researches the legal, political and religious choices that the peoples and communities in the late Middle Ages made regarding the category of violence, specifically in the republics of Northern Italy. Her first book, The Unruly Tongue: Speech and Violence in Medieval Italy (University of Pennsylvania Press), scheduled for release in January 2025, investigates the nexus of speech and violence by asking how “what words do” changes as a cultural concept in the 13th century. Processes of peacemaking, understandings of vendetta, developments in law and literature, and the choices that constructed documentary forms remain fascinating sites of historical inquiry for her. 

Her articles have appeared in Speculum, Viator and the American Journal for Legal History. Her article “Compositio: Horizons of Truth in The Decameron, the Notarial Register, and Civic Peace Pacts” (2021) won an honorable mention from the Society for Italian Historical Studies. Her research has been funded by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, the Mellon Foundation, the Lauro De Bosis Fellowship at Harvard University, the Medieval Academy of America, and the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, among others. 

Vise received her Ph.D. in medieval and early modern history from Northwestern University (2015) and her master’s in theological studies from the University of Notre Dame (2008). Vise previously held positions at Washington and Lee University and New York University, as well as fellowships at Harvard University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  

Her current research reconstructs the role of informal talk and gender in peacemaking processes and their failures in medieval republican life. Her teaching plans this academic year include a course on the Black Death.