Giotto and the Oratrix: Maddalena Scrovegni and Her Formation as a Writer in Fourteenth-Century Padua

This article considers the work of Maddalena Scrovegni (ca. 1360–1429), discussing her formation as a writer in the social and intellectual context of late Trecento Padua, and her changing reputation in early Renaissance humanist circles. It presents her best-known surviving work, a composition written for Jacopo dal Verme (ca. 1350–1409) in 1388, in a modern translation by Joseph Spooner. It discusses how this composition relates to the emergence of oratorical humanism in Padua, to contemporary developments in the city’s art, and to the early fourteenth-century frescoes painted by Giotto (ca. 1267–1334) in the Scrovegni family chapel. The article offers suggestions as to how Scrovegni’s creativity may have been shaped by her experiences of social privilege, gendered marginality, humanist scholarship, and art.