Romance writers do not, as a rule, gender their audience. They often address their traditional opening remarks along the lines of class and, in the fiction of the genre, suppose that their poems will be listened to by ‘lordynges’ and their households, to entertain them in the public space of the hall:

Like other medieval genres, romances were inherently conservative, and when the audience for written romances spread to embrace the rural gentry and the urban mercantile classes, and the arena of their consumption moved from performance in the hall to private reading in the chamber or reading aloud to small groups in the solar or the workshop, their authors saw no reason to mention it. There is, therefore, no direct evidence within the texts themselves that the small group of romances which relate the adventures of women were written for an audience of literate laywomen, but I would like to argue that a comparison with female saints’ lives – especially the most popular ones, often found in household miscellanies alongside those very romances – suggests that they were, and that they shared with the popular lives of the virgin martyrs a preoccupation with the character of the ‘good’ woman, as demonstrated by her ideal conduct during a period of severe trial.

There are many examples in late-medieval art showing women as consumers of devotional literature; Annunciation scenes from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries show Mary reading, while her mother St Anne is most often depicted teaching her to read; SS Katherine, Mary Magdalen, and Barbara are also commonly pictured reading. This all contributes to an ‘iconography of female piety’ that is also reflected in numerous portrayals of wealthy lady donors in books of hours, stained-glass windows, paintings and tomb effigies. Women are also widely portrayed as reading and writing in romances, and even if this is in the context of fiction, it is normative fiction.