The International and Interuniversitary Centre MedioEvA was founded in June 2022 by a team of specialists on medieval literature from “Università degli Studi di Siena”, from “Sapienza – Università di Roma” and from “Université de Tours”. It is a brand-new cultural initiative which aims at promoting, coordinating and advancing research activities, projects, papers and digital resources about female literature written in Latin and in vernacular languages in the medieval millennium (VI-XV centuries).
MedioEvA aims to study female literature and the cultural role of women in medieval settings from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective, rejecting anachronistic and too much rooted prejudices. MedioEvA intends to explore women’s objective and subjective perception in the Middle Ages among the centuries: the Centre seeks to use philological tools for promoting studies, editions, even editions of unpublished works and translations of texts that have never been translated or texts which need a new translation.
MedioEvA also wants to be a fundamental vehicle for making this little-known literature known outside of a very narrow circle of specialists, promoting initiatives which aim at divulging an updated vision of medieval women’s cultural role and a revised approach to the Middle Ages as a whole (meetings with students, training for teachers, involvement in cultural festivals). The knowledge of female literature will enhance the physiognomy of the Middle Ages, an age that is well acknowledged as the cultural foundation of our present time. There’s a female Middle Age which demands to be heard.
