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Research and writing leading to a book on how prominent families in late medieval and early modern Rome appropriated Christian saints and hagiography into their own histories to further their moral and political authority.

This project investigates the "domestication" of Christian sanctity in medieval and early modern Rome. In the course of the Middle Ages, there developed a pronounced sense that churches and their saints belonged to specific regions, neighborhoods, and even families. This "emplacement" of medieval families and medieval saints, coupled with a resurgent interest in Rome’s Christian antiquity and a heightened attentiveness to noble lineages, culminated in Roman families weaving themselves, genealogically and materially, into Rome’s Christian past. Saintly lineages blossomed, as did the identification of churches as the former residences of early Christian and late antique saints—cementing presumed links between place, descent and moral worth.