Prologue

The Prologue contains an analysis of a fresco in the Palazzo del Podestà in San Gimignano, dating from the beginning of the fourteenth century, and showing a man and a woman reading together, their faces eroded by time. Both in itself and in the context of its cycle, whose meaning is not entirely clear to art historians even today, this image evokes the guiding research questions of the book: the position of ‘woman’ in relation to the discourse of the written text and reading, the documentary ‘inexistence’ of medieval women readers, and their imagined lack of authority and independence. It both posits and challenges the familiar story of medieval misogyny (that a woman poses a threat to intellectual activity), and alerts us to the complexities of the encounter between gender and reading.