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We love a good story, donāt we? Especially a historical one, filled with towering figures and grand narratives. We picture monks toiling away in dimly lit scriptoria, their quills scratching across parchment, preserving knowledge for future generations. It's a romantic image, steeped in a certain kind of masculine mystique. But what if that picture is incomplete? What if a significant part of that story has been deliberately, or perhaps simply conveniently, overlooked?
The truth, as it so often does, lies beneath the surface, waiting for someone to dig it up. And what a recent study has unearthed about the production of medieval manuscripts should make us question everything we thought we knew about who held the pen ā quite literally ā in the Latin West between 400 and 1500 CE.
For centuries, the narrative of manuscript production has been dominated by images of male monastic communities. Yet, despite an estimated ten million handwritten manuscripts produced during this period, with around 750,000 still preserved, a fundamental question has remained largely unasked: what was the quantitative contribution of female scribes?. Itās a gaping hole in our understanding, a silence where voices and efforts should have been acknowledged long ago.
Now, finally, someone has bothered to count. Using the Benedictine colophon catalogue, a vast collection of short statements often added to the end of manuscripts that identify the scribe, commissioner, and date of production, researchers have conducted the first bibliometric analysis of female scribal contributions. ... continue reading th
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