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The hidden hand of medieval female scribes

A team at the University of Bergen in Norway have determined that a minimum of 1.1% of medieval manuscripts from around 800 to 1626 CE were copied by female scribes, with a probable total exceeding 110,000 texts. This estimate suggests that approximately 8,000 may still exist today.

Research on female involvement in manuscript production has often focused on individual monastic scriptoria, regions, or smaller timeframes. Previous work provided compelling evidence of women's roles in such environments yet was not designed to offer broad-scale quantitative assessments.

In the study, "How Many Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts Were Copied by Female Scribes? A Bibliometric Analysis Based on Colophons," in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, researchers conducted a bibliometric colophon analysis to quantify women's participation as copyists.

Colophons are short statements added at the end of handwritten manuscripts that supply information such as the scribe's name, the person who commissioned the manuscript, place and date of production, and occasionally personal reflections. A total of 23,774 manuscript colophons were examined from institutional collections.

Systematic review of each colophon involved searching for distinct female indicators such as self-referential terms or female names.

Researchers only counted colophons where the scribe's gender was definitively identifiable, yielding a count of 254 colophons linked to female scribes. They did not include cases of ambiguous or probable female attribution, ensuring a conservative estimate of 1.1%, which represents a minimum bound of female scribal contributions.

Analysis showed a consistent, albeit small, proportion of manuscripts copied by female scribes from around 800 to 1400 CE, followed by a marked increase after 1400 in manuscripts written in local (non-Latin) languages.

Findings indicate that female scribes produced at least 110,000 manuscripts during the Middle Ages, with roughly 8,000 still surviving. Known female scriptoria account for only a small fraction of this output, implying the existence of additional unidentified women's scribal communities.

Questions remain about the socio-political and economic contexts that supported female manuscript production. Future research should map the geographical and chronological distribution of female-authored colophons, examine parish, census, and institutional records for evidence of overlooked book-producing networks, and analyze the types of texts copied by women to reveal how, when, and why they participated in medieval literacy.