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Corinne Bonnet

Full Professor

Storia delle religioni (SSD: HIST-04/A)

050 509035
 
Monday, 6-8pm and Tuesday, 4-6pm, or any other time, always by appointment by sending an email.
Palazzo della Carovana, piano quarto, studio 107

Corinne Bonnet is a historian of the ancient world, particularly studying religions as cultural constructions embedded in time, space, and socio-political contexts. She pays particular attention to intercultural situations that, in the ancient Mediterranean – from Tyre to Carthage or Rome, and from Athens to Babylon or Alexandria – bring together cultic practices and representations of the divine, between tradition and creativity. 
She also analysed the historiography of ancient religions, particularly the work and archives of Franz Cumont (1868-1947). 

Her monographs include: Melqart. Cultes et mythes de l'Héraclès tyrien en Méditerranée (1988); Astarté. Dossier documentaire et perspectives historiques (1996); Le «Grand atelier de la science». Franz Cumont et l'Altertumswissenschaft (2005); Les Enfants de Cadmos. Les paysages religieux de la Phénicie hellénistique (2015); La civiltà dei Fenici. Un percorso mediterraneo nel I millennio a.C. (2020, with E. Guillon and F. Porzia); Divinità in viaggio. Culti e miti in movimento nel Mediterraneo antico (2021) and the edited volumes Gli dèi di Omero. Politeismo e poesia nella Grecia antica (2016, with G. Pironti); What's in a Divine Name? Religious Systems and Human Agency in the Ancient Mediterranean (2024, with A. Palamidis).

She studied at the University of Liège and taught at Namur (Belgium), Cosenza, Roma Tre, the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, and Toulouse (France), before joining the Scuola Normale in 2024. She is a doctor honoris causa of the universities of Lausanne and Erfurt, a foreign correspondent of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (Paris), and she was responsible, between 2017 and 2023, in Toulouse, of the ERC Advanced Grant «Mapping Ancient Polytheisms. Cult Epithets as an Interface between Religious Systems and Human Agency», which studied the countless appellations of Greek and Semitic gods in inscriptions, recording more than 25,000 attestations across the Mediterranean from 1000 BC to 400 CE (https://base-map- polytheisms.huma-num.fr/).