‘Feminine Hands’: The Hidden History of Women in Medieval Book Culture
Monks Get the Credit. Nuns Deserve Some Too. Evidence from Their Manuscripts—and One Sister’s Teeth
In 2014, researchers discovered lapis lazuli embedded in the teeth of a skeleton unearthed at a German convent. Scribes and illuminators pulverized the costly, brilliant blue stone—sourced a world away in Afghanistan—to create ultramarine pigment to decorate prized manuscripts. So how did this nun end up with bits of it in her mouth?
“In adding detail to their illuminations, it is plausible to assume that artists would have occasionally licked their brushes to make a fine point, a practice that later artist manuals refer to explicitly,” write the authors of an extensive paper on the discovery. “The repeated activity of inserting the tip of the brush into the mouth could explain the distribution pattern.”
However it got there, we only know this woman by the residue of her work. But the lapis lazuli particles suggest this scribe not only participated in manuscript production but was also skilled enough to entrust with valuable materials. As I recount in my book The Idea Machine, she was far from alone.
Women in the Shadows
In his two-volume study published in 1896, Books and Their Makers in the Middle Ages, George Haven Putnam reviewed the data then available and said, “It is difficult to estimate too highly the extent of the services rendered by these feminine hands to learning and to history throughout the Middle Ages.”
Putnam recounted several examples of women scribes and convent scriptoria producing exquisite manuscripts. The examples have only multiplied in the years following, thanks to careful archival research and analysis of the manuscripts themselves.
The story of medieval book culture usually focuses on monks, and deservedly so. As Europe’s intellectual center shifted from Roman aristocrats to bishops and monastics, monks became the primary infrastructure of intellectual life. But men have unduly overshadowed women in this story.
“Christianity has no sacred tongue,” writes historian Robert Louis Wilken, “but it cannot exist without books.” Monastic communities required tomes of all types: liturgical volumes for conducting services, collections of canons and rules, penitential manuals, hagiographies, biblical commentaries, not to mention the biblical books themselves. In a world before print, human hands scratched out every letter on every page. Many of those hands—more than we have generally acknowledged—were women’s.
The signs are, to be sure, partial. While evidence for female learning in the Middle Ages “is far more impressive than that for both Roman classical and early Germanic societies,” says John Contreni of Purdue University, it is nonetheless “maddeningly submerged from modern view.” Of the 1,615 scribes identified in one major manuscript study, for instance, only 1 percent were female—just 16.
But that figure, says Stanford scholar Elaine Treharne, reflects only signed manuscripts, and the vast majority were “penned anonymously.” Throughout the history of medieval studies, scholars have generally assumed all scribes to be male unless compelling evidence exists to the contrary: talk about submersion. The lapis lazuli discovery should, however, make us wonder how many might emerge from the shadows.
We do know of many others.
Bookish Beginnings
The institutional foundation for women’s literary activity stems from the basic requirements of the monastic life. Literacy was obligatory and spread with the monastic movement.
“Always have a book in your hand and before your eyes,” St. Jerome counseled one prospective monk in a letter. More than an aspirational piety, it was a job requirement. The Rule of St. Benedict presumed monks and nuns knew how to handle books, and the Rule of St. Caesarius of Arles mandated literacy for monastics of both sexes.
In his Lausiac History, Palladius describes a nun named Silvania. “Being very learned and loving literature she turned night into day by perusing every writing of the ancient commentators, including 3,000,000 lines of Origen and 2,500,000 lines of Gregory, Stephen, Pierius, Basil, and other standard writers,” he says. And Silvania was no dabbler: “She laboriously went through each book seven or eight times.” This reading both lifted and liberated her. “Wherefore also,” says Palladius, “she was enabled to be freed from knowledge falsely so called and to fly on wings, thanks to the grace of these books; elevated by kindly hopes she made herself a spiritual bird and journeyed to Christ.”
Palladius, writing in the early fifth century, suggests Silvania’s devotion, though exceptional, fell within the range of what a nun’s literary life could look like. He intended his audience—women as well as men—to take note.
For women, the practical implications of this kind of literary attentiveness were especially significant. Women monastics had to manage the same readerly efforts as their male counterparts, but they were mostly on their own. Some “double houses” (co-ed monasteries that thrived at certain times and places) gathered men and women into a single community, though in separate quarters. In the dedicated women’s monasteries which predominated, however, men were largely barred except to administer the sacraments.
The absence of male clergy from daily convent life meant women’s reading, writing, copying, and teaching were of necessity substantially self-directed.
Founders and Cultivators
The women who moved from reading to founding—who built the institutions in which literary culture could take hold—began appearing in the sixth century, well before the Carolingian era that usually gets credit for reviving European learning.
Queen St. Radegund founded the Abbey of the Holy Cross in Poitiers. Her chosen monastic rule insisted all nuns learn to read and write. Radegund wrote poetry and was famous for her command of Greek and Latin church fathers. Tellingly, an eleventh-century depiction shows her sitting with a pair of writing tablets, evidence not so much of her advanced literary attainments (which were significant) as of the later assumption of how a scholarly nun should appear: ready to write.
In the same century, on the far side of Europe, St. Ita of Ireland schooled local boys and girls in her monastery at Cell Ide, including a young St. Brendan the Navigator. And across the Irish Sea in the eighth century, the abbess Hild founded and directed a double monastery where she supervised both daily life and the copying of books. “Archaeological excavations at Whitby,” says Robert Davis, “as well as a convent at Barking, have found abundant styli, the main tool of students, suggesting that there was robust scribal activity or education that included both women and men.”
In the mid-eighth century, the abbess Fausta commissioned a copy of the gospels. The volume, copied in Francia, now goes by the name of its male scribe, the Gundohinus Gospels. But Fausta’s purpose in acquiring the book was for the edification and education of her nuns. Along with the gospel text, the book contained expository notes (exposiciones) to elucidate various passages and themes. “Their inclusion strongly suggests that this book was intended to function as a type of teaching tool, designed to enhance its readers’ knowledge and understanding of the Gospels,” writes scholar Jessica Hodgkinson.
Sometimes the commissioning went the other direction. The missionary bishop Boniface, note Hodgkinson and John Barrett, commissioned a “deluxe copy of St Peter’s Epistles to be written in gold” from a woman named Eadburg, likely the abbess of Minster-in-Thanet. As with the earlier example of the lapis lazuli, the costly materials speak well of Eadburg’s access to scribes of significant skill.1
Why the gold? “To impress honor and reverence for the Sacred Scriptures visibly upon the carnally minded to whom I preach,” Boniface explained. Mary Wellesley quotes Boniface’s letter to Eadburg in her book The Gilded Page. She also mentions the story of Loeba—the first named English female poet—a nun who trained under Eadburg and later joined Boniface’s missionary work, becoming the abbess of Tauberbischofsheim in Germany where her bookish ways persisted.
These women were founders and cultivators who built the physical, intellectual, and institutional spaces in which reading and writing could be learned and practiced. What’s more, commissioning, distributing, employing books proved instrumental in how they governed their communities. They all preceded—or sat just on the cusp of—the great Carolingian reform movement, even helping to lay some of the groundwork.
When that renewal came, women joined right in. We’ve already met one participant: our lapis lazuli nun worked in the same period, somewhere in the eleventh or twelfth centuries.
Carolingians and Beyond
Contreni points to signs of intellectual curiosity and significant projects from the period. Rotrude and Gisela, daughter and sister of Charlemagne, read Augustine’s commentary on John for themselves and requested that Alcuin of York, a close advisor to Charlemagne, write another for them.
Contreni also highlights cases of women teachers of both boys and girls. One famous example, the noblewoman Dhuoda, authored an instructional manual for her son early in the 840s full of spiritual, moral, and secular advice. Beyond that, as we’ve already seen, women monastics copied their own books and books for others.
As I detail in The Idea Machine, the majority of ancient Latin manuscripts available today were copied during the Carolingian age—estimates climb as high as fifty thousand, with roughly seven thousand surviving, compared to around eighteen hundred for all the years prior. “Carolingian scribes were the unsung saviours of Western written culture,” says Steven Roger Fischer in A History of Reading. How many of those unsung saviors were women? Given the default tendency to gender unnamed copyists as male, I suspect it’s more than we assume.
Of course, we do have abundant evidence for Putnam’s “feminine hands” in some cases. Women scribes, for instance, customized standard texts for use in their communities, including prayers and monastic rules. Says Robert Davis,
In the Salisbury Psalter, a 10th or 11th century prayerbook, nuns appear to have replaced masculine-inflected words with feminine ones, suggesting that the book was adapted for use by a community of women. Where an original prayer read, “famulum tuum” (“thy servant”), it was rewritten with “famulam tuan” (“thy [female] servant” or “handmaiden”).
Davis also points to an Old English copy of the Regularis Concordia, modified to apply to the seo abbodysse (abbess), not abbod (abbot), along with other tweaks that signal the intended audience.
Some women went well beyond copying and modifying received texts to authoring their own. Consider the tenth-century canoness Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim Abbey in Saxony. Described as one of the first named Latin dramatists since classical period, she not only penned narrative poems and histories but also six plays modeled after Terence. In her self-deprecating preface, she speaks to the sexism of the time:
Through the grace of the Creator I have acquired some knowledge of the arts. He has given me the ability to learn—I am a teachable creature—yet of myself I should know nothing. He has given me a perspicacious mind, but one that lies fallow and idle when it is not cultivated. That my natural gifts might not be made void by negligence I have been at pains, whenever I have been able to pick up some threads and scraps torn from the old mantle of philosophy, to weave them into the stuff of my own book, in the hope that my lowly ignorant effort may gain more acceptance through the introduction of something of a nobler strain, and that the Creator of genius may be the more honoured since it is generally believed that a woman’s intelligence is slower. Such has been my motive in writing, the sole reason for the sweat and fatigue which my labours have cost me.
Though it’s probably not to the liking of many modern readers, the work that followed only tended to demonstrate Hrotsvitha’s skill and intelligence.
And then there’s St. Hildegard of Bingen, the Sibyl of the Rhine, one of the most celebrated and learned monastics of the High Middle Ages.
Sibyl of the Rhine
A Benedictine abbess, Hildegard produced three mystical-theological treatises—at least one earning papal approval and attracting readers in every subsequent generation—two scientific and medical treatises, two works of invented language, around eighty songs, and a collection of nearly four hundred letters addressed to bishops, popes, secular rulers, monks, and fellow nuns.
Hildegard’s scientific writings deserve special attention for what they reveal about the culture she emerged from. Though primitive, her two books—Physica and Causae et Curae—reflect immense learning and useful application. “The Physica, consisting of nine books listing almost a thousand plants and animals in German, is a study of botany, zoology, stones, metals and elements, describing their physical and medicinal properties,” writes biographer Fiona Maddocks. “Causae et Curae, as its title indicates, examines the causes and cures of diseases . . . and offer[s] remedies, mainly using plants.”
Hildegard did not spring from nowhere. She’s the product of a centuries-long tradition in which convents mandated literacy, founded schools, commissioned commentaries, and copied books. The tradition inaugurated by nuns like Silvania in the fifth century continued to flower in the twelfth through Hildegard—and countless others whose names we’ll probably never know.
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Eadburg’s story gained a remarkable postscript in 2022. While studying an eighth-century Latin copy of the Acts of the Apostles in the Bodleian, Hodgkinson noticed the hint of letters and other markings in the margins. 3D imaging revealed drypoint writing, that is, without ink. Eadburg’s name, along with sketches of human figures, had been scratched at the edge of the pages some fifteen times. “Very few surviving early medieval manuscripts contain evidence of having been created, owned, or used by a woman,” said Hodgkinson. “It is possible that Eadburg herself added her name. . . . If so, by making her mark in a book she interacted with and which held meaning for her, she has left a tangible record of her presence that has survived for hundreds of years.” For more, see also this story in the Guardian.
Fascinating, thank you. I’m a fan of Cuthbert and the Lindisfarne Gospels. I’ve read several books of historical fiction of that era, being particularly struck with the work of the copyists. I wrote my own book of haikus that were distillations of the psalms. It was a surprisingly meaningful experience to copy them by hand into a journal, walking in the footsteps of other women before me.
There are books written to educate young women not intended for the convent that hold up virgin martyrs' studies as a guide for their life, telling them that St. Agnes went to school, and that others, St. Catherine and the like, studied at home.