Grace Delmolino

Bio

I am a feminist medievalist scholar specializing in the literature, law, and history of the Italian Middle Ages (12th-14th centuries). For the 2025-26 academic year I was a Solmsen Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin Madison.

My first book, Boccaccio and the Law: Rights, Violence, Consent (Oxford University Press 2027), argues that Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), famous for the Decameron and its down-to-earth short stories about religion and sexuality, was a cutting-edge legal theorist of consent. Boccaccio studied canon law at the university in Naples and his later fictional works dramatize legal cases and comment on theories of jurisprudence. Boccaccio found a particular affinity with Gratian’s Decretum (c. 1140), a foundational textbook in the teaching of medieval canon law. Gratian and Boccaccio alike advocate for women’s—and men's—status as consenting subjects, in sharp contrast to social practice of the time.

My work on consent in matters of marriage and sexuality, originating in medieval canon law, has now expanded to encompass the broader history of consent—from sex to law to political obligation to bioethics to digital privacy—which I cover in my course Humanities 2A: Consent. Within the Italian program at UC Davis, I offer literature and culture courses across all periods, covering topics like Dante's Divine Comedy, medieval lyric poetry, Renaissance Italian literature and philosophy, literary autobiography, and contemporary Italian culture and politics.

I am also Associate Editor on the editorial board of Digital Dante, a global digital humanities venue for research on Dante and his world.