Edward Loss, a postdoctoral researcher in medieval history at the University of Genoa, has spent the past ten years immersed in some of Italy’s most extensive and least explored library collections. His fellowship at the Robbins Collection Research Center brought that ongoing work into sharp focus, opening up new lines of inquiry at the intersection of ecclesiastical law and lay criminal justice.
At present, Loss investigates female patrimonial and property rights for PatriFem, a University of Genoa project funded by the European Research Council that spans Western Europe from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. He also teaches the course “History and Culture of Notarial Practice in Late Medieval Bologna” in the Archival Science, Paleography, and Diplomatics master’s degree program at the State Archives of Bologna. His background includes numerous postdoctoral fellowships and academic positions, including a recent visiting professorship at Stanford University.
Loss’s research centers on the ad maleficia courts of late medieval Bologna and Perugia—tribunals responsible for prosecuting the gravest crimes, including theft, homicide, and treason. The State Archives of Bologna alone hold hundreds of thousands of unedited registers produced between 1242 and 1532. “Practically every [new] research project of mine was inspired by evidence unearthed . . . when I was looking for a certain topic but ended up also finding unexpected material,” he explains. Guided by this serendipitous quality, Loss has mapped an array of striking historical themes within the records, from corruption and papal information-gathering to espionage and female intelligence networks. One such finding—a specialized counter-espionage institution known as the Office of Spies—became the subject of his 2020 monograph, Officium Spiarum. Spionaggio e gestione delle informazioni a Bologna (secoli XIII–XIV).
Over several years of research, Loss has accumulated more than three hundred cases in which members of the clergy stood trial before ad maleficia courts that, in principle, had no jurisdiction over them. Canon law, refined through centuries of papal decretal legislation, granted clergy the privilege of responding only to ecclesiastical courts. Yet these lay proceedings moved forward and sometimes reached verdicts. “They challenged much of what I thought I knew about ecclesiastical immunity in the late Middle Ages,” Loss notes. To weigh the theoretical fine print of canon law against local statutory legislation, Loss turned to the Robbins Collection Research Center for a two-month fellowship that ended on March 31, 2026.
At the Robbins Center, Loss encountered sources he had not anticipated. A seventeenth-century manuscript compilation (Robbins MS 224) assembling decisions, arguments, and canonical rubrics on clerical immunity proved particularly valuable. It served as a guide through the canonical tradition, identifying which precepts exerted the greatest influence on juristic opinion well beyond the medieval period.
Over two months, Loss gathered nearly one terabyte of digitized material and entered 1,572 individual names into a custom-built database cataloguing the criminal trials. While it is too early to draw definitive conclusions, he notes that the “majority of indicted surnames in cases where the ecclesiastical authority was finding resistance in their intervention to stop these procedures could also be found in the composition of city parties and factions” violently disrupting late thirteenth-century central-north Italy. For Loss, the “influence of these political dynamics on ecclesiastical judicial immunity” represents a highly promising avenue for further study as he continues his work on the database.
Looking back on his experience, Loss expresses deep appreciation for the intellectually stimulating environment and the helpfulness of the Robbins staff who seamlessly coordinated the logistical details of his research stay. His findings promise to illuminate the practical tensions that arose when sacred immunity met secular authority.