Women in the medieval university: a reappraisal of the life and myth of Bolognese Novella d’Andrea from the fourteenth to the twentieth century

The article analyses the literary sources and accounts of Novella d’Andrea, the daughter of Giovanni d’Andrea, an eminent professor at the Bolognese Studium. The study examines the unprecedented case of a woman teaching law at the university in the first half of the fourteenth century, casting light on the cultural and family environment in which she grew up. The sources that conserve her memory are analysed, in particular the account provided by Christine de Pizan, with a new interpretation of her passage, but also those sources that have disseminated misleading information, generating confusion about the historical figure of Novella d’Andrea. The visual works of art that, like the literary accounts, have fuelled her myth include a work that has hitherto been ignored by historiography on Novella d’Andrea, the fourteenth-century woman who broke the glass ceiling.