Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, La papessa Giovanna e le sue leggende. Un percorso di ricerca tra codici e testi. Florence: Sismel. Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2023, ix, 283 pp., 16 color images.

Myth-making was well in place already in the Middle Ages, whether we think of King Arthur, Emperor Charlemagne, or the mysterious Round Table. Many times, fear of sexual transgression permeated the discourse, which found its vivid expression in the motif of the Popess Joanna, Giovanna, Joan, Anna, Jutta, or the like. Numerous scholars have already dealt with this topic, and this until very recently, but no one has doved more deeply into it than Agostino Paravicini Bagliani. In 2021 he had published an edition of 109 relevant texts dealing with this mythical figure, and in the current book he offers an in-depth analysis of the historical development of this legendary account, investigating the rich manuscript and incunabula tradition, the many different responses to this myth in Latin and in a variety of vernaculars, taking us from the thirteenth to the early sixteenth century.