So, if male and female scribes are so difficult to distinguish, why should we strive to make the distinction? Many more manuscripts written by female scribes probably survive than can be securely identified as such today. To identify female scribes, we have to rely on colophons-which appear only in a minority of manuscripts- or arguments about hands which can be linked to other manuscripts with colophons or where the scribe used female forms or pronouns to describe herself or that resemble specific handwriting that was taught at a given institution. Female scribes also copied the same sorts of texts as male scribes. When men and women write in the same script, there are no consistent differences that can be assigned to gender. 257r ).īut why create a list solely of female scribes at all (apart from facilitating arguments on Twitter)?Īfter all, as Alison Beach and many others have noted, sex and gender do not seem to have inherently affected the quality of scribes’ writing. Image above: page containing a colophon that mentions that Pola, daughter of Abraham the scribe, completed copying this book on Wednesday, Ma(now Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. I am particularly grateful to Elaine Treharne and Diane Watt for their comments on the format and content of the lists and their encouragement. This project has already benefitted hugely from other scholars’ advice. The database contains a field to list the name of the person who proposed a given scribe or manuscript for inclusion, and I would be eager to hear if there are other ways you would like your contribution acknowledged, too. This will also permit the database to have as large a geographic and chronological span as possible. After all, there are far too many pre-modern female scribes for one person to track down and list them all. I will expand these lists over the coming weeks, and I am seeking crowd-sourced contributions to expand the list. So far, the lists just contain the first 100 female scribes and references to female scribes that came to my mind, to make the point that female scribes did exist across pre-modern societies. The second notes female scribes mentioned in other sources, such as the inscription mentioning Sciathis Magia, an 18-year-old libraria, or Archbishop Boniface’s letter requesting that Abbess Eadburg “make a copy of St Peter’s epistles written in gold” (“ut mihi cum auro conscribas epistolas domini mei, sancti Petri apostoli”).īoth of these lists are works in progress. The first list covers female scribes’ surviving works. This database consists of two main lists. I have just launched an extremely low-tech beta version of this database at.

It is modelled on recent, inspiring projects that have collected examples of women’s interactions with books beyond scribal contributions, such as the Repertorium of Manuscripts Illuminated by Women in Religious Communities of the Middle Ages and Women’s Literary Culture and the Medieval Canon. This open access resource will direct readers to examples of female scribes and to the studies about female scribes that have been written in the past few decades. Nevertheless, the notion persists that in the ancient and medieval world, “almost all scribes were men”, at least in popular culture and in corners of the internet.įrustrated by the persistence of the claim that “all scribes were male”, both on Twitter and among some undergraduate students, I thought it would be useful to make a database of known female scribes from the pre-modern period. In the past few decades, scholars such as Alison Beach, Diane Watt, Pamela Robinson, Henrike Lähnemann, and Kim Haines-Eitzen-to name just a very few- have made important strides in emphasizing how many pre-modern female scribes existed, and how many texts and manuscripts they helped to transmit and create. Some of the most studied surviving manuscripts and texts-including one of the earliest and most complete Bible manuscripts and the earliest Old English chronicle-have been associated with female scribes at one time or another. “Who is your favourite pre-modern, female scribe?” If you were to ask any cataloguer, librarian, curator or scholar of pre-modern writing that question, they would probably have a few interesting examples.įrom ancient Mesopotamian scribes like Amat-Mamu to illuminators like Enda to famous poets like Christine de Pizan, female scribes existed in all regions and time periods. Image above: Christine de Pizan writing, from a manuscript that contains her autograph (Paris, BnF Français 835, f. By Alison Hudson, University of Central Florida

Mesopotamia scribe