Female Scribes in the Middle Ages

March 17, 2025 6:47 AM

"[N]o attempt has been made up till now to quantify women’s contribution to [medieval] manuscript production. Here we address the research question: What was the quantitative contribution of female scribes based on available sources?" The answer may surprise you!

Spoiler:

Based on realistic assumptions we show that at least 1.1% of the medieval manuscripts were copied by female scribes (lower estimate). ... However, our investigation reveals one very interesting novel insight: It is highly unlikely that the few female scriptoria described in the literature so far can account for the more than 110,000 manuscripts, which we estimate to have been written by female scribes. Thus, our investigation strongly suggests that there are female book-producing communities not yet identified or at the very least that there must have been many more female scribes than what has hitherto been accounted for. This raises the question: what historical socio-political and socio-economic contexts apart from the known female book-producing communities supported women working as scribes during the Middle Ages?

posted by jedicus (15 comments total)

And that's Numberwang!
posted by demonic winged headgear at 8:09 AM on March 17 [1 favorite]

I appreciate the critical response in that post, though given that the authors were (as that criticism notes) careful to acknowledge the weaknesses in their data sources and only sought to establish a lower bound, I don't know that it's entirely fair to say, essentially, "this study is useless because it doesn't give us an exact number, and it's asking the wrong questions anyway." Speaking very much as a dilettante in this area, it was not clear to me how this study was so much less clever or interesting than one that determined the number of sealed documents produced by the English chancery per day based on sealing wax purchases. I would have appreciated an expansion on that point.

I was particularly perplexed by this criticism:

Strictly speaking, yes this is a gap in our knowledge: nobody knows know how many female scribes there were working in Europe between these years, nor do we do how many manuscripts they produced. But we don’t know how many male scribes were working during this period either, and when you put it like that it seems like a strange question to ask.

Given the common belief (at least popularly; I don't know about among medievalists) that manuscripts were copied out by male monks, I don't think it's a strange question to ask how many female scribes there were. But beyond that, knowing how many female scribes there were also necessarily answers the question of how many male scribes there were.*

* Yes, this is assuming a gender binary, but that's probably reasonable given the difficulties inherent in ascribing non-binary identities to historical individuals about whom we know almost nothing on a personal level and whose conception of gender was probably very narrow, especially given that we're talking almost exclusively about monks and nuns.
posted by jedicus at 8:56 AM on March 17 [4 favorites]

The flaw is not in the lack of an exact number (and if it were that would indeed be an absurd criticism). The problem is that their methodology produces a number with no adequate context. "Knowing"* how many female scribes there were does not answer the question of how many male scribes there were, because of the impossibility of knowing how big the pool is. It produces a contextless number that can't be evaluated (which is the Numberwang joke also).

*("Knowing" here means producing a number -- using math because math makes things look "accurate" -- out of a source that we have every reason to believe is unreliable for the task at hand.)
posted by demonic winged headgear at 9:27 AM on March 17

Strictly speaking, yes this is a gap in our knowledge: nobody knows know how many female scribes there were working in Europe between these years, nor do we do how many manuscripts they produced. But we don’t know how many male scribes were working during this period either, and when you put it like that it seems like a strange question to ask.

Pure "how to suppress women's writing" - she wrote it, maybe, but it's not really that important, why would you even ask? I guess this will be the new political line, same as the old political line - women (and people of color, and gay people, and immigrants, etc etc ) didn't really do anything, and if they did do it it's not important, and if it might conceivably be important, well, surely there are other questions we should answer first.
posted by Frowner at 9:41 AM on March 17 [5 favorites]

I don't know about among medievalists

“Of course, nuns spent their whole damn lives working: writing manuscripts, running hospitals...” [going-medieval]
posted by HearHere at 9:49 AM on March 17 [2 favorites]

The problem is that their methodology produces a number with no adequate context.

What would be an adequate context? That is not clear from the criticism. It seems to me that the context is the 23,774 manuscripts in the Benedictine colophon catalogue, further extrapolated to the estimated total corpus of European manuscripts based on the number known to have survived and two estimates of survival rates that are in pretty close agreement (92.5% and 93%; this seems at odds with the criticism's statement that survival rates are "a notoriously uncertain conjecture", though perhaps those two rates were cherry-picked by the study's authors or can otherwise be criticized).

I mean, the study absolutely isn't claiming that they had access to some gold standard catalogue of the colophons of every medieval manuscript ever produced, all of which had been meticulously examined and coded. They're making the modest claim that, given the available evidence, it appears that at least 1.1% of European manuscripts were copied by female scribes.

It produces a contextless number that can't be evaluated

Again, I don't know. It seems to me that by establishing a lower bound they point toward how many more manuscripts coped by women we might hope to identify by other means (e.g. patterns in who-copied-what, handwriting analysis, maybe even something wild like trace DNA). It gives reason to believe that there are at least several thousand such manuscripts surviving, which seems like a strong impetus to go and find them and answer all kinds of questions about them: who wrote them? in what individual or organizational context? what, if anything, is notable about the subject matter, value, time and place, length, quality, disposition, etc of those manuscripts?
posted by jedicus at 9:51 AM on March 17 [1 favorite]

But I have threadsat more than is healthy! I really do appreciate the critical response, even if I don't fully understand it.
posted by jedicus at 9:58 AM on March 17

Pure "how to suppress women's writing" - she wrote it, maybe, but it's not really that important, why would you even ask? I guess this will be the new political line, same as the old political line - women (and people of color, and gay people, and immigrants, etc etc ) didn't really do anything, and if they did do it it's not important, and if it might conceivably be important, well, surely there are other questions we should answer first.

I know Professor Drimmer slightly and I was a little surprised to read that she was so negative about this study, but it isn’t at all my impression of her that she’s coming at it from a place of minimizing women’s contributions.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 10:01 AM on March 17

Thanks for posting this, jedicus. When STEM collides with The Arts Block it gives me a little synergistic [sum greater than the parts] frisson. I don't see what the griping is about: trad historiographic research might have listed all the obvs cases of chick lit [von swester Anna; per manus sororis Margarete; hat geschriben swester Adelheydis; bi mi suster Lysbet] and left the list in an appendix. This Nature study looks like sampling a population to obtain a percentage: such as zoologists might use observing moths or finches.

There have been [at least] two nice, now old, studies where the methods of my wheelhouse [DNA and Protein sequence alignment to construct phylogenetic trees of relationships among the data] have been applied to the sequence of letters in various editions of medieval manuscripts: [cw: autopuff for my blog] Little Red Riding Hood and Canterbury Tales.
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:30 AM on March 17 [1 favorite]

I was a little surprised to read that she was so negative about this study,

I agree, from prior knowledge of Dr. Drimmer's work, that she is quite committed (and rightly so) to redressing past neglect of women's contributions both in the middle ages and in contemporary academia. Her objections are to the paper's methodology.
posted by demonic winged headgear at 12:41 PM on March 17

That is a very interesting blog post, BobTheScientist. I did not know, for a couple out of many possible examples, that The Canterbury Tales circulated for a century in manuscript form before being printed, or that no copies in Chaucer's hand were extant.
posted by jamjam at 2:23 PM on March 17

jedicus, thanks for the post; hadn't known of Drimmer's work

I really do appreciate the critical response, even if I don't fully understand it

FPP: “By counting only certain cases, we produce a lower bound, an inferable minimum... Note that the estimation of such a lower bound was our aim”
=
literal minimization

Speaking very much as a dilettante in this area, it was not clear to me how this study was so much less clever or interesting than one that determined the number of sealed documents produced by the English chancery per day based on sealing wax purchases. I would have appreciated an expansion on that point.

Drimmer’s ref.: “it has been calculated that out of 971 papal decretal letters of the twelfth century whose destination is known, 434 went to England. This statistic does not mean that the papal curia expended nearly half its energies on English business, but that English recipients were more careful to preserve papal letters than clergy in other European states.” [g]

[wiki:] “the religious perspectives of women were held to be unorthodox by those in power, and the mystical visions of such authors as Julian of Norwich, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Hildegard of Bingen provide insight into a part of the medieval experience less comfortable for the institutions that ruled Europe at the time”, i.e. aiming for minimization of women within an a small corpus of extant texts is ‘less interesting’ than understanding how many texts may have actually been produced by researching expenditures on sealing wax
posted by HearHere at 2:27 PM on March 17

all the obvs cases of chick lit

Come on.
posted by jokeefe at 7:12 PM on March 17

Finding a lower bound isn’t minimizing a value. (Possibly an actual CP Snow esque two cultures problem? I don’t know what intellectual
training would leave the belief that it was.)
posted by clew at 7:42 PM on March 17 [1 favorite]

Possibly an actual CP Snow esque two cultures problem?

Drimmer locates it earlier:

many art historians came to distrust the Morellian method [wiki (1816-1891)] because it disguises observational intuition in the language of science, taxonomizing a mind-numbing litany of minutiae in order to bestow the pedigree of positivism… All the computer achieves is to render more efficient and consistent—that is, to optimize—judgments that were first made by human estimation, while in the same stroke cloaking the biases of its conclusions in the deceptively neutral format of charts and graphs.
...
One does not need to believe in C. P. Snow’s exaggerated portrait [u.chicago] of the sciences’ and the humanities’ polarity to admit that nowadays the most positivistic brand of scientific inquiry continues to command the greatest respect from both the public and the institutions that determine funding structures and allocate research budgets. And because of this, the risk in integrating them “becomes largely a matter of absorbing the anarchic humanities and floundering social sciences into the more orderly and grown-up natural sciences.” One bulwark against this subsumption is to foster confidence and find meaning in incertitude…

posted by HearHere at 7:17 AM on March 18