As a cultural historian of medieval Europe, Melissa Vise researches the legal, political, and religious choices that the peoples and communities in the late Middle Ages made regarding the category of violence, specifically in the republics of Northern Italy. For example, her first book investigates the nexus of speech and violence by asking how “what words do” changes as a cultural concept in the 13th century. That project disentangles the history of liberty from the history of self-government by suggesting that any political ethics about speech depends directly on what the culture that proposes it believes words do. Processes of peacemaking, understandings of vendetta, developments in law and literature, and the choices that constructed documentary forms remain fascinating sites of historical inquiry for her. Her current book project reconstructs the role of informal talk and gender in peacemaking processes and their failures in medieval republican life. 

Her first book, The Unruly Tongue: Speech and Violence in Medieval Italy, came out in January 2025 with the University of Pennsylvania Press' Middle Ages Series. Her articles have appeared in Speculum, Viator, and the American Journal for Legal History. Her article “Compositio: Horizons of Truth in The Decameron, the Notarial Register, and Civic Peace Pacts” (2021) won an honorable mention from the Society for Italian Historical Studies. Her research has been funded by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, the Mellon Foundation, the Lauro De Bosis Fellowship at Harvard University, the Medieval Academy of America, and the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, among others. 

Vise received a Ph.D. in medieval and early modern history from Northwestern University (2015) and a master's degree in theological studies from the University of Notre Dame (2008). Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Virginia, Vise held positions at Washington and Lee University and New York University as well as fellowships at Harvard University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.