The conference tries to illustrate about the books and the libraries, the reading literacy practices, as well as the writing use of women under medieval and Renaissance. But it is necessary to make a consideration regarding to the sources that can allow us to enter in the private sphere of a part of the society that is rarely visible in both the public and private documents. One of the most important transformations of the Lower Middle Ages was that it passed from a world that operated practically oral, except in very limited fields, to another one where the writing part dominated all the fields of both the public and private life. Moreover, the great diversification of the variety of documentaries that from the 13th century ocurred, affected to both the public administrations and the private matters. Similarly, the documentary mass preserved presents an absolute prevalence of the public documentation facing the private, the domestic, rarely preserved.

Josepa Cortés is a full professor of the Universitat de València, where she imparts classes of Palaeography, Archives and other related sciences since the 1981, when she licensed in the specialty of medieval history. She pushed the Master’s degree in Archives and Documentation and nowadays she conducts the course of Edition of Medieval Texts. She has been a member of the Consell Tècnic d’Heràldica i Vexil·lologia of the Valencian Government and Academic Visitor of the Oxford University. Her doctoral thesis, defendid in 1987, is called Liber privilegiorum civitates et regni Valencie. Critical edition and codicological is a study and edition of the privileges granted to the city and Kingdom of Valencia, since the conquest of Jaume I to the modern era, from the original documents and the cartularies that served to save the memory.