This chapter explores a more concrete and historicized figure of the woman reader. It explores the forces that make her appear and disappear, and surveys the state of knowledge on medieval female literacy, and the documentary evidence on women readers. It investigates typically female modes of reading (such as the educational, the devotional, and the courtly) and the visual models that were available to vernacular authors to forge their imagined textual interlocutor. It shows how the protagonist of this book is the product of two cultural events within the history of reading and the material culture of the book: the raise of literacy among the laity and women in the years under consideration, and a changed scenario insofar as theories and practices of reading are concerned.
Challenging Paradigms Through Ecological Neuroscience: Lessons From Visual Models
