Tea at Trianon: Medieval Female Scribes

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, March 29, 2025

Medieval Female Scribes

A scholarly view. From Nature:

There are several studies into monastic scriptoria for women (Bischoff, 1966, Parkes, 1983, Robinson, 1997, Hamburger, 2016) starting with Bernhard Bischoff’s famous study of Chelles in France (Bischoff, 1966). The contributions of the Birgittine nuns of Vadstena alongside the brothers is explored in scholarly literature (Hedström, 2009, Dverstorp, 2010). Others cast a wider net to cover regions in selected centuries, from the eighth century to 1500 (McKitterick, 1992, Brown, 2001, Beach, 2004, Cyrus, 2009, Lifshitz, 2014). These studies together with a few, isolated pieces of evidence such as a contemporary illustration (Fig. 1) and archaeological finds (Radini, Trom et al. 2019) show that manuscript production in female religious institutions or female participation in lay workshops occurred in different periods and in different geographical areas. Women’s contributions as scribes are explored and attested in scholarly literature (Blanton et al. 2013; 2015; 2018; Saunders and Watts, 2023) as well as more popular essays and initiatives (e.g. Davis, 2018, Hudson, 2021). However, there is a knowledge gap: Despite the emerging field of quantitative codicology (Chandna et al. 2016), to date no study has tried to quantify the female scribe contribution. The role of female scribes in the Latin West during the Middle Ages has been defined within specific geographical or chronological delimitations only. This allows for in-depth analysis of the available source material, but not broad-scale conclusions. The aim of this paper is to address the research question: What was the quantitative contribution of female scribes based on available sources? How large was the fraction of the manuscripts copied by women? To provide a tentative answer to this question we conduct the to our knowledge first bibliometric analysis of the contribution of female scribes. We perform the study using colophons. (Read more.)