Dávid Falvay (PhD in Medieval History, Budapest, 2006, Habilitation in Literatury Studies, 2018, DSc 2025) is professor and chair of the Department of Italian Studies at the ELTE (Eötvös Loránd University) of Budapest. He teaches Italian cultural history, literature and philology.
He was fellow at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti, Florence in 2009 and in 2014/2015. He thought at several Italian universities (Rome, Florence, Padua, Naples, Venice, Perugia, Bologna) as invited or Erasmus visiting professor. He is a member of the Collegio di Dottorato in Italianistica of the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.
He specializes in late medieval religious literature, with a special emphasis on the Western cult of Central European saints, on female heretics, on Italian hagiographical manuscripts, on Italian translations (volgarizzamenti) of late medieval devotional writings. Recently he has been working with the Italian version of the Miroir des simples âmes and extensively with the Meditationes vitae Christi. His recent research project is entitled: Franciscanism and Franciscan Literature in a Comparative Perspective.
His publications, along with a number of articles and book chapters in Italian and in English, published partly in prestigious journals (Hagiograpchica, Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, Franciscana, LEA), and in collective volumes by known publisher houses (Brepols, Brill, Viella, SISMEL, CEU Press) include a collection of essay in English, entitled Vernacular Hagiography and Meditation Literature in Late Medieval Italy (Budapest, 2022 https://www.eltereader.hu/media/2022/08/BTK_Falvay-David_Vernacular-Hagiography-web.pdf ) and an Italian monograph entitled Meditare sulla vita di Cristo nell’Italia basso-medievale (Rome, ISIME, 2025 https://www.isime.it/product/meditare-sulla-vita-di-cristo-nellitalia-basso-medievale/ ). He has edited with Diego Dotto and Antonio Montefusco, the critical edition of the Italian version of the Meditationes vitae Christi (Venice, ECF, 2021) https://edizionicafoscari.unive.it/it/edizioni/libri/978-88-6969-510-0/ ).
Home page: http://olasz.elte.hu/?page_id=94&lang=it
List of publications: https://m2.mtmt.hu/api/author/10028547?&labelLang=eng