Every book was a difficult project in the Middle Ages. And according to a first quantitative review of his child, more than a few of them were written by women.
Experts estimate medieval scribes who produced more than 10 million manuscripts between 400-1500 CE, each meticulously copied, illustrated and bound by hand. Only about 750,000 still exist today, but there is still plenty to learn from the surviving artifacts, as well as the craftsmen they have made. But although most of the books were written by monks who were bent scriptoriums over agencies in monastery, that was not always the case. The striking historical revisions are detailed by researchers from the Norway University of Bergen in a study published last month in Humanities and Social Sciences Communication.
The authors noted that although earlier studies the gender roles investigated in monastic scriptoria, no one tried to calculate how many women contributed to these intense companies. To start their studies, the team relied on a common section found in most medieval manuscripts called a colophon. Apparently a biography of a publisher, scribes often included colophones at the end of books to record their name, which commissioned the project, the production date and sometimes even a short reflection statement.
Firstly, researchers turned into an existing catalog of Benedictine colophones and all 23,774 submissions for language confirmations revised. A total of 254 were linked to female scribes, with 204 with the names of the women themselves. This is about 1.1 percent of the books of the Benedictine database.
“We can deduce the use of existing estimates for the production and loss of manuscripts, assuming that the estimates are valid that at least 110,000 manuscripts were copied by female scribes, of which about 8,000 should exist,” the researchers wrote.
Although a modest number, researchers warned that their estimate is probably lower than the actual total. Many women may have omitted their gender or name in their colophones, or they simply have not recorded at all. In the meantime, various survival percentages of the manuscript in all regions could also have been the data.
One thing is almost certain: the number of well -known female scriptoria described in existing records could probably not have produced all estimated 110,000 female manuscripts. That is why the team believes that their research “strongly suggests that there are no female book -producing communities that have not yet been identified.” Another possibility is that there have just been ‘many more female scribes’ than we thought.
“Our study should be seen as a first step, opening new perspectives,” wrote the authors.
More Deals, Reviews and Purchase Guides