Dr. Morgan Powell is a scholar of the media history of the Middle Ages and Lecturer of English at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences and Arts.

• IntroductionPart One: Reading as sponsa et materChapter One: Mutations of the Reading WomanChapter Two: Reading as Mary DidChapter Three: Constructing the Woman’s MirrorChapter Four: Seeking the Reader/Viewer of the St. Albans PsalterPart Two: Reading the Widowed BrideChapter Five: Quae est ista, quae ascendit? (Cant. 3:6); Rethinking the Woman Reader in Early Old French LiteratureChapter Six: Ego dilecto meo et dilectus meus mihi (Cant. 6:2); Mary’s Reading and the Epiphany of EmpathyChapter Seven: A New Poetics for aventiure; The Exposition of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s ParzivalChapter Eight: The Heart, the Wound, and the Word—Sacred and ProfaneConclusionAppendix: The Prologue to ParzivalList of Works Cited

Morgan Powell’s Gender, Reading, and Truth in the Twelfth Century: The Woman in the Mirror is a meticulously written and highly sophisticated book that argues for a re-evaluation and new understanding of the act of reading and of the meaning of a female reader (including in the form of an iconographic representation in manuscripts and as a textual motif) in the long twelfth century. Eschewing binaries such as literate/illiterate, vernacular/Latin, oral/written, male/female, and even text/picture, Powell’s approach offers a much more complex and ultimately convincing approach to understanding the rise of vernacular literature and the role women--or rather “the woman”--played in the twelfth century.