Chiara Frugoni (4 February 1940 – 9 April 2022) was an Italian historian and academic, specialising in the Middle Ages and church history.

She was awarded the Viareggio Prize in 1994 for her essay, Francesco e l'invenzione delle stimmate.

[1] She spent time during childhood and youth in a sanatorium due to suffering from tuberculosis.

Frugoni graduated from Università degli studi di Roma "La Sapienza" in 1964 with a thesis entitled Il tema dei tre vivi e dei tre morti nella tradizione medievale italiana (the Three Living and the Three Dead in Italian medieval tradition), published two years later in the "Atti della Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei".

[2] In it, she searched for a working method that took equal account of both texts and images, a method she always considered important,[3] in line with her conviction that "the image speaks".