Laura Minervini is Professor of Romance Linguistics and Philology at the University of Napoli ‘Federico II’; she studies the history of Romance languages and literatures in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. She is primarily interested in language and cultural contacts across the Mediterranean. Her research examines the French dialect used in the Crusader States and in Cyprus (12^th–14^th c.), the linguistic history of the Iberian and Sicilian Jewries in the Late Middle Ages, the development of Judaeo-Spanish and the diffusion of Italian in the Ottoman Empire (16^th–18^th c.), and the making of the medieval legend of the Assassins. She has edited Spanish, French, and Italian literary documentary texts, in Latin and Hebrew scripts.