Medieval Monastic Female Scribes by Lexa Fisher

Christine de Pisan, 1407 (Wikimedia Commons | Public Domain)

When we think of medieval monastic scribes it's likely that a tonsured male figure comes to mind. But women were also scribes! There are written records of this, such as necrologies that identify these women, and archaeological evidence that also points to these female artists.

The latest evidence to surface is the discovery of lapis lazuli in the teeth of a female monastic who lived at the monastery at Dalheim between 997 and 1162.

Why is this discovery of lapis lazuli in a nun's teeth so remarkable? This pigment was quite rare and therefore only the best artists were allowed access. Its use by female scribes indicates that they were just as highly skilled as their male counterparts.

 Silk repaired manuscript

In many ways, female and male scribes did the same work of copying manuscripts by hand onto parchment or velum sheets, most often using black ink made from oak galls. Nuns and monks also used rare pigments and gold leaf in manuscripts. But it is only in nunneries where we find silk threads used to repair manuscripts.

Alison on the right.

I became interested in female scribes during my Latin studies in college. One summer I was fortunate to have been admitted to a summer program on codicology (the study of old books) and paleography (the study of old handwriting) at Oxford University. There, I met Alison Beach, a fellow student who is now a professor of history at University of Saint Andrews. Alison has a blog on medieval female scribes at http://scriptrix.org/

While at Oxford we were allowed access to the Bodleian library. Access first required a swearing in (in Latin) by a robed librarian and signing of a pledge to treat the books with utmost care. Each item we wanted to view had to be brought from a storage area--no wandering the stacks here! All codices had to be handled while wearing white cotton gloves, and the pages were held open by beads resembling rosaries. It was a religious experience for our class of twelve, all who happened to be women.

Image from Wikipedia

During a weekend trip to London we visited the British library and were treated to a viewing of manuscripts written entirely on purple-dye vellum -- a Codex Purpureus. Purple dye came from snails found in the Mediterranean and was highly valuable. To have an entire book written on purple-dyed vellum was truly a rare treasure, and even rarer to have examples of these books today.

With the plethora of books so readily available to us today, it's easy to forget how precious these volumes were throughout history, and how much labor was required to produce them.