CIRFIM’s main research areas are listed in Appendix A of the Centre’s Statute. They are reflected in the expertise and scientific interests of the member faculty. By way of example, the following themes and areas may be mentioned:

• al-Fārābī’s philosophy;
• ancient and medieval interpretations of the Christian Scriptures;
• Arabic tradition of Aristotelian metaphysics;
• architectural models and theological doctrines between the 9th and 14th centuries;
• Aristotle and the Aristotelian Tradition;
• Augustine and the Augustinian Tradition;
• Byzantine and post-Byzantine musical paleography;
• disability, material culture and society in medieval Europe;
• Greek and Latin Christian apologetic literature;
• Greek palaeography (Byzantine and humanist manuscripts, epigraphic writings, history of collecting);
• historiography and rhetoric in Byzantine literature of the Comnenian period (11th-12th centuries);
• institutional and social history of the medieval university, with a focus on the environment of the Padua Studio in the 13th-15th centuries;
• medieval doctrines in contemporary thinkers;
• medieval Greek hymnography;
• medieval Greek music theory in relation to the Latin world and Ancient Greece;
• medieval musical instruments and their diachronic development;
• monastic literature;
• music and liturgical space in the churches of Padua: texts, images, music and sounds;
• music and the teaching of music in the Studium: doctors and students;
• pedagogical readings of Dante’s spirituality;
• senses and theories of perception in devotional practices in the Western Middle Ages;
• sound ecosystems and music in travel narratives;
• synergies, interferences, contrasts between material culture and spirituality (12th-15th centuries);
• the history of the concept of philosophy between Antiquity and the Middle Ages;
• the illuminated books of masters and students of philosophy and theology;
• the problem of the Arab-Islamic sources of the Divine Comedy;
• the reception of Byzantine culture in the West;
• the relationship between medicine and music theory in Padua in the 15th century;
• the relationship with the landscape and the environment in the late Middle Ages;
• the results of the comparison between imperial Platonism and Christian thought;
• the role of women in late medieval European society and culture;
• the socio-cultural history of the movement to translate Greek into Arabic;
• the transmission of Greek philosophy through Arab and Jewish philosophers to the Latin philosophers of the Middle Ages;
• Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy of education;
• urban collective identity in communal and post-communal Italy.