Unknown Hands: Women Copying the Medieval Book (Guéville)

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In 2019, researchers provided the first non-textual physical evidence of medieval European women’s scribal activity by discovering ultramarine pigment in the dental calculus of a woman buried at a 9th- to 14th-century church-monastery complex in Germany. This pigment—a rare blue made from lapis lazuli—was typically used only in the most luxuriously illuminated manuscripts. These findings reverberated in mass media outlets, with articles published in Archaeology, The Atlantic, Information Today, National Geographic, and CNN. This coverage highlighted that, in the minds of the general public, female scribes and illuminators were, if not an impossibility, at least an exception.

In 2025, a team led by University of Bergen researchers estimated that female scribes were responsible for 1.1% of Latin-Western manuscripts produced between c. 800 and 1626 CE. Even this small percentage represents tens of thousands of manuscripts—evidence of a widespread yet largely invisible tradition of female scribes.

In this episode, we explore the world of medieval female scribes, women whose contributions have often remained invisible. Drawing on her doctoral research, which assembles the largest dataset to date of manuscripts copied by women in Western Europe before 1600, Estelle Guéville shows how female scribes complicate our narratives of medieval literacy, education, and book production. Far from being exceptions, these women were active across diverse religious and cultural contexts for centuries.

Estelle Guéville is a PhD candidate in medieval studies at Yale and has worked as a curator and a researcher in multiple cultural institutions around the world, including the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Her research focuses on premodern manuscript cultures, gender studies, and computational approaches to textuality. Her doctoral work examines scribal practices and women’s roles in textual production and transmission, advancing data-driven approaches to medieval book cultures. With David J. Wrisley, she is the co-author of Medieval Manuscripts and the Computational Humanities: Big Data, Scribes, and the “Paris Bible” (2026), which explores how AI-driven and computational methods can renew questions of authorship, textuality, and scribal attribution.

Additional voice acting provided by Sarah Belsky and Rachel Belsky.

Additional sound credits:

• “church bell” by DisasterServices, licensed under CC0. Source: https://freesound.org/s/252789/

• “choir cathedral remix” by klankbeeld, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Source: https://freesound.org/s/204923/

• “Monastery Footsteps” by markadirector, licensed under CC0. Source: https://freesound.org/s/467417/

• “Quill and Parchment” by Nickh69, licensed under CC0. Source: https://freesound.org/s/507864/

  
  

Further reading:

• Beach, Alison I. Women as Scribes: Book Production and Monastic Reform in Twelfth-Century Bavaria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

• —, Erik Kwakkel, Peter Vandenabeele, Eva Vermeersch, and Sophie Andrade. “Guda, a sinful woman: a multi-scalar portrait of a medieval scribe and illuminator.” Historical Research, vol. 99, iss. 284, 13 February 2026, pp. 204-234. https://doi.org/10.1093/hisres/htaf017.

• Blanton, Virginia, Patricia Stoop, and Veronica O’Mara, eds. Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Hull Dialogue. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013.

• —, eds. Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Kansas City Dialogue. Turnhout: Brepols, 2015.

• —, eds. Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Antwerp Dialogue. Turnhout: Brepols, 2018.

• Cardoso, Paula F. F. Art, Reform and Female Agency in the Portuguese Dominican Nunneries: Nuns as Producers and Patrons of Illuminated Manuscripts (c. 1460–1560). PhD dissertation, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2019.

• Classen, Albrecht. “Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century German Women Scribes, Women Editors and Women Poets.” Amsterdamer Beiträge zur Älteren Germanistik 56, no. 1, 2002, pp. 199‐222. https://doi.org/10.1163/18756719-056-01-90000015.

• Cyrus, Cynthia J. The Scribes for Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009.

• Edmunds, Sheila. “The Life and Work of Clara Hätzlerin.” Journal of the Early Book Society for the Study of Manuscripts and Printing History, vol. 2, 1999, pp. 1–25.

• Guéville, Estelle. “Unknown Hands : Acquérir, structurer et interroger les données de la production des femmes copistes avant 1600.” Actes de la Conférence Humanistica, edited by Serena Crespi, Simon Gabay, Martin Grandjean, Ariane Pinche, Marie Puren, and Léa Saint-Raymond. Anthology of Computers and the Humanities, vol. 4, May 2026, pp. 17-26. https://doi.org/10.63744/VzNBllw1Ml8n.

• Haines-Eitzen, Kim. “‘Girls Trained in Beautiful Writing’: Female Scribes in Roman Antiquity and Early Christianity.” Journal of Early Christian Studies, vol. 6, no. 4, 1998, pp. 629‐646. https://doi.org/10.1353/earl.1998.0071.

• Hemptinne, Thérèse de. “Des femmes copistes dans les Pays-Bas au bas Moyen Âge (14e–15e siècle). Approche d’une activité féminine mal connue.” Secretum Scriptorum: Liber Alumnorum Walter Prevenier, Leuven: Peeters, 1999, pp. 129–143.

• Kienhorst, Hans. “Participants in the Periphery?: Female Scribes and Commercial Book Production in the Later Middle Ages.” Queeste, vol. 32, no. 1, 2025, pp. 160‐175. https://doi.org/10.5117/QUE2025.1.008.KIEN.

• Moreton, Melissa. “Nun-Scribes’ Colophons in Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Italy.” Literary Snippets: A Colophon Reader, edited by George A. Kiraz and Sabine Schmidtke, vol. 2, Gorgias Press, 2024, pp. 143-152. https://doi.org/10.31826/9781463244033-009.

• —. “Pious Voices: Nun-Scribes and the Language of Colophons in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy.” Essays in Medieval Studies, vol. 29, no. 1, 2014, pp. 43‐73. https://doi.org/10.1353/ems.2013.0000.

• —. “Scritto di bellissima lettera”: Nuns’ Book Production in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Italy. PhD dissertation, University of Iowa, 2013. https://doi.org/10.17077/etd.l282y0od.

• O’Mara, Veronica. “A Middle English Text Written by a Female Scribe.” Notes and Queries, vol. 37, no. 4, 1990, pp. 396‐398. https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/37-4-396.

• —. “A Syon Scribe Revealed by Her Signature: Mary Nevel and Her Manuscripts.” Kungliga Vitterhets Historie Och Antikvitets Akademien, Konferenser, vol. 93, Continuity and Change: Papers from the Birgitta Conference at Dartington 2015, edited by Elin Andersson, Claes Gejrot, E. A. Jones, and Mia Åkestam, June 2017, pp. 283-308. https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/453215.

• Ommundsen, Åslaug, Aidan K. Conti, Øystein A. Haaland, and Bodil Holst. “How Many Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts Were Copied by Female Scribes? A Bibliometric Analysis Based on Colophons.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, vol. 12, no. 1, 2025, pp. 1‐5. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-025-04666-6.

• Poor, Sara S. The Literary Agency of Medieval Women: Kunigund Niklasin and the Library of St. Catherine’s in Nuremberg. Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2026.

• Riegler, Michael, and Judith R. Baskin. “‘May the Writer Be Strong’: Medieval Hebrew Manuscripts Copied by and for Women.” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies & Gender Issues, no. 16, Fall 2008, pp.9‐28. https://doi.org/10.2979/nas.2008.-.16.9.

• Schreiner, Peter. “Female Copyists in Byzantium. With a Note on the Scribe Eugenia in Par. lat. 7560.” Schreiner, Byzantine Culture, vol. 2, no. 16, 2009.

• Stoop, Patricia. “Sermon-Writing Women: Fifteenth-Century Vernacular Sermons from the Augustinian Convent of Jericho in Brussels.” Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures, vol. 38, no. 2, 2012, pp. 211‐232. https://doi.org/10.5325/jmedirelicult.38.2.0211.

• Winston-Allen, Anne. “Outside the Mainstream: Women as Readers, Scribes, and Illustrators of Books in Convents of the German-Speaking Regions.” Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Kansas City Dialogue, vol. 27, edited by Virginia Blanton, Veronica O’Mara, and Patricia Stoop. Brepols Publishers, January 2015, pp. 191-206. https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MWTC-EB.5.105531.

Transcript:

Interviewer: In 2019, researchers analyzing the dental calculus of a woman buried at a church monastery complex in Germany made an unexpected discovery. Embedded in the mineralized plaque of her teeth were traces of ultramarine, a brilliant blue pigment made from lapis lazuli. In the Middle Ages, ultramarine was among the most precious substances used in manuscript illumination.

It was imported over long distances, ground with care, and applied sparingly. It was reserved for the most luxurious books. Its presence in this woman's mouth suggests repeated intimate contact with pigment, most plausibly through the making of illuminated manuscripts. One can imagine this woman thoughtfully chewing on the nib of her quill as she plans out the next stroke.

This finding made headlines across international media, from National Geographic to CNN, and that excitement is telling. For many outside the field, and even within it, the idea that a woman might have copied or decorated luxury manuscripts still seems surprising. Female scribes were imagined as anomalies, or they were not imagined at all.

Yet recent research suggests a very different picture. In 2025, a team led by scholars at the University of Bergen estimated that women were responsible for approximately 1.1% of Latin Western manuscripts produced between about 800 and 1626. At first glance, that number appears to be small, but when placed against the vast scale of medieval book production, it represents tens of thousands of manuscripts.

What we see here is not a handful of exceptions, but rather a widespread and persistent tradition of women copying books, one that has remained largely invisible. For much of the history of medieval studies, there has been an unspoken tradition. Scribes were assumed to be male unless overwhelming evidence indicated otherwise.

As Elaine Treharne, a professor of English at Stanford University, has observed, male attribution functioned as the default, shaping catalogs, editions, and scholarly narratives for generations. Even when women were acknowledged, they were often framed as curiosities, exceptions that proved the rule. As Melissa Morton, a researcher at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton University, has shown in her work on Italian convents, female religious scribes were frequently dismissed as marginal or atypical, reinforcing the idea that book production was fundamentally a male monastic activity.

This episode challenges that assumption. It shows that women copied books across a wide range of contexts, in enclosed convents and urban workshops, in Latin and in the vernaculars, producing liturgical, devotional, historical, legal, philosophical, and instructional texts. Recovering these women does more than fill gaps in our knowledge.

It complicates how we understand medieval literacy, education, and authorship. It forces us to reconsider how books were made, who made them, and whose labor was deemed worth remembering. It questions textual transmission and knowledge production. In that sense, this episode aligns with broader efforts to rethink the Middle Ages through multivocal perspectives, and with a form of academic activism that asks why women's work was rendered invisible in the first place, and why its recovery matters now.

Throughout this episode, you are invited into convents and workshops, guided through the materiality of books, and introduced to women who left traces of themselves on the page. Through translated readings of colophons and manuscript descriptions, these voices, long muted, are made audible again. Today, we're diving into a deceptively simple question: If women copied so many medieval books, why does no one seem to know about them?

Estelle Gueville, your research brings together the largest data set to date of manuscripts copied by women in Western Europe. So let's start with the central problem. How do we identify female scribes?

Estelle: Well, identifying female scribes is rarely straightforward. It's like finding a needle in a

haystack, or almost a treasure

hunt.

The easiest way to find them is to look at colophons. Um, those are short inscriptions, usually at the end of a manuscript, that give information about production, um, so dates, scribes, patrons, and so on. Um, they usually include requests for prayers and other somewhat random information. These colophons can provide a full name, a first name, just a pronoun, or even a female form of a noun in some languages.

Um, these indicate the gender of the scribe or scribes who copied the manuscripts. In some cases, we also have medieval catalogs of manuscripts produced by individual people. For instance, Alison Beach, a professor of medieval history at University of St. Andrews, studied the case of a woman named Diemud.

Diemud, who lived in 12th-century Germany at the Monastery of Wessobrunn, never signed any of her manuscripts. But we have two medieval catalogs listing the manuscripts that she copied. Less obvious methods include paleographical analysis. Um, so this is when we can reattribute new manuscripts to already known hands through script comparison.

We can also gather contextual information about the provenance of a manuscript and make reasonable assumptions about who produced it. But the main problem is, how do you practically find this information in the silenced archives?

Interviewer: What do you mean when you talk about the silenced archives?

Estelle: When we talk about silenced archives, we're not talking about archives without women, women archives structured in ways that prevent us from seeing them.

Even when women are present in manuscripts, centuries of cataloging decisions, often made by men, can bury their work. A manuscript copied by a nun might be listed under the monastery's name, or the text itself, or even a later owner, while the scribe her- herself is left invisible or even misgendered.

Interviewer: So that sounds like a problem not just for gender, but more broadly for other understudied groups?

Estelle: Exactly. Similar mechanisms marginalize people of lower social status, communities excluded from traditional scholarly canons, or racialized individuals, basically anyone who wasn't already legible in the structures that archives and catalogs created. Metadata, the very tools we rely on to find and study manuscripts, is political.

It decides what is searchable, what is named, and what remains invisible.

Interviewer: So if these archives weren't designed to show women's work, how can scholars recover it?

Estelle: Well, that's where methodology comes in. There are a number of catalogs that are helpful. For instance, the series of catalogs of dated manuscripts that was created in the mid-20th century in most Western European countries.

Um, but there are also the catalogs of colophons published by the Benedictines of the Bouvre in Switzerland. These catalogs provide transcriptions of colophons and indexes where we can find female scribes. We can also use institutional and online catalogs, but the scribes' names are unevenly recorded, and there is sometimes confusion between scribes, possessors, patrons, and authors.

We can also use digital humanities with methods like stylometry to identify scribal signals in diplomatically transcribed text. In practice, that means that we can use AI and handwritten text recognition to train models to transcribe manuscripts and preserve abbreviations, special letter forms, spacing, and punctuation.

Then we can apply a series of statistical analysis to detect patterns in the way these microfeatures are used by specific scribes, and then we can attribute new manuscripts to these known hands. And that's where my work and the database I created are useful. I built on the work of other scholars such as Alison Beach, Melissa Morton, Cynthia Cyrus, Patricia Stoop, Sheila Henmans, Ver- Veronica O'Marah, Sarah Poor, and others.

I also used printed and digital catalogs to gather what was already known and discover new women who acted as scribes. I created a list of almost 1,300 manuscripts copied at least partially by women, and this data is available on the website of the project Unknown Hands. Um, this is where people can explore, visualize, download, and reuse the data about these fascinating women

Interviewer: So we've talked about the archives, the challenges, and the tools that help us see women's work, but what does a woman's hand actually look like in practice?

Estelle: I think the best way to answer that is to let these women speak as much as possible in their own words. The example of the Monastery of St.

Katharina in Nuremberg is a great example of the institutional infrastructure supporting female scribes. More than 30 named copyists are known from the 15th century alone, and many more remain anonymous. In St. Katharina, most manuscripts are not the work of a single woman, but of many sisters who produced books together, even if the colophon records only one name.

Basically, they wrote books collectively for the use by the community. Kunigunde Niclasin, for instance, was a scribe and later book mistress or librarian between 1428, when the house consented to Observant reform, and her death in 1457. She participated in the copy of 28 manuscripts, including an entire Bible.

She also oversaw the cataloging of the convent's library, and we find evidence of this work in notes she left in several manuscripts now in the Nuremberg State Library. We also know that novices received structured training in reading, singing, and copying, and that writers were exempt from manual labor and given dedicated workspaces.

In some cases, some women make it explicit in their colophons that they worked for their community. Take Ursula Schönfegen. She calls herself a poor sister, and she writes that her book was produced with great love and faithfulness for her community. But she doesn't stop there. She asks for prayers, not only for herself, but for her deceased mother and for a revered spiritual father.

In her words, writing becomes an act of devotion, memory, and relational care.

Quote: This little book, I, poor Sister Ursula Shanfagan, have written with great love and faithfulness for all my dear sisters and sisters at St. Catherine's in Nuremberg. I beg with all my heart that you always remember me earnestly and faithfully, and pray for me and for my dear departed mother's soul, and for our revered faithful father, Master Hans, who has passed away.

And if you hear of my death, oh, then I commend my poor wretched soul faithfully to God

Estelle: Another sister, Agnes Paben Bergerin, copies a vernacular legend of Saint Margaret. She frames it explicitly as a gift written, as she says, "With the whole desire of my heart" for her beloved mother and sister. She asks for prayer in return, and then something very interesting happens. Underneath her colophon, another sister responds in ink simply, "Gladly, gladly."

This manuscript preserves not just a text, but a dialogue, a conversation across hands. And then there is Kunigund Holzschoerin, who recalls something different again. She notes that she paid for the parchment herself. Her colophon foregrounds both scribal labor and material investment, a reminder that women sometimes financed the very books they produced.

Interviewer: Do you have examples from other places perhaps?

Estelle: Yes. In Brussels, Katharina von Giseghem, an Augustinian nun at the Convent of Jericho, leaves a remarkably detailed colophon. She tells us when she began and finished the book, which feast days framed her labor, and even her age. She was 26. She explained that she worked, as she puts it, at all chosen times whenever she was not occupied with communal duties.

Quote: In the year of our Lord, one thousand four hundred seventy-two. On the feast day of Saints Peter and Paul in June, Sister Catharina van Jesenham, professed nun in our cloister at Jericho, began to write this book on the tabernacle, and she completed it in the same year on the fourth day of April, on the feast day of Saint Ambrose, which fell on a Sunday.

She did this in honor of God and for the common edification with great diligence, working on it diligently at all chosen times when she was not engaged in communal work. She was twenty-six years old at the time. Pray for her eternal salvation out of love for God. This book belongs to the cloister of Our Lady Rose planted in Jericho within Brussels, near St.

Catherine's of the Augustine Order. Whoever finds it, return it to the religious ladies for the love of God.

Estelle: Other women mark time, age, and endurance in similar ways. A sister in Amsterdam, Beatrice Dirks, tells us she was 62 years old and had lived in the cloister for 45 years when she wrote her book, and she asks for specific prayers in return. In Florence, Cleof copied the Gospels by lamplight. She writes that the book was completed with great fatigue and discomfort, and she asked that it be treated with respect and returned to her convent.

In Brussels, we encounter books written by multiple named sisters, sometimes over nearly two decades, and they request a single Ave Maria for all their souls. Others still record donations, jubilees, choir counts, paper usage, or obedience at the end of their life.

Interviewer: And what about Raffaella di Arnolfo

Estelle: Baldi?

Raffaella is especially interesting. She was a member of the prominent aristocratic Baldi family, who were the patrons of Giotto's frescoes in the chapel of Santa Croce. Raffaella is especially interesting. In a colophon dated 1496, she notes that this is the eighth book that she has copied with much effort and hardship, and she suggests she may only finish one more.

On its own, the statement sounds modest, even wary, but we know that 18 manuscripts survive in her hand, more than a third of her convent's entire corpus.

Quote: This book belongs to the nuns of the Paradiso, copied by me, Sister Raffaella, with much effort and hardship. And it is the eighth that I have copied, all for the spiritual consolation of my sisters in Christ. And I do not believe I will copy more, except for the Corona of the monks, which I have started in another volume.

And if the letter is rustic, the author and the words are worthy, and therefore it should be regarded. Amen. Finished on the twenty-third day of June, 1496

Estelle: In her colophon, she apologizes for her rustic script, yet firmly defends the text itself. The author and the words, she insists, are worthy. Writing here is spiritual labor, physical exertion, and intellectual responsibility. She does not name her prestigious family. She names her work.

Interviewer: Raffaella

Estelle: shows us that female scribes were not copying mechanically.

They evaluated text, articulated value, and persisted despite fatigue. They had agency

Interviewer: And finally, Christine de Pizan, often remembered primarily as an author.

Estelle: Yes, she's probably one of the most famous medieval women. She lived in the late 14th century and in the early 15th century in Paris. After the death of her husband, she became a court writer, and she supported her family with the money she made from the text she wrote.

Um, and that earned her the title of the first professional woman of letters in Europe. But beyond her work as an author, she supervised an urban workshop that produced more than 50 manuscripts. Some were written wholly or partly by her own hand, others by anonymous collaborators she directed. She worked for elite patrons and commissioners, including members of the royal courts such as Philip the Bold, the Duke of Burgundy, Margaret of Burgundy, Dauphine of France, or Queen Isabeau of Bavaria.

Christine is a great example of a non-religious woman who copied manuscripts, but she's not alone. The work of secular women was far less likely to survive under identifiable attribution. Lay women who participated in manuscript production often did so within urban household, courtly settings, or mixed-gender workshop environment, where the recording of labor was inconsistent and where attribution practices overwhelmingly privileged male scribes, stationers, or patrons.

Yet we have several other examples of laywomen copying manuscripts for themselves, for family, or for the book trade. Clara Hazelorn, for instance, was active in the second half of the 15th century, and she's known as a scribe of at least nine manuscripts within the late medieval urban bookmaking milieu of Augsburg.

We have examples of, um, several lay female scribes that belonged to elite or noble backgrounds, a social position that may have afforded them access to education, materials, and leisure necessary for book production. For instance, Elisabeth, Countess Palatine of Palatinate-Lothringen, was the daughter of Augustus I, Elector of Saxony, and Anne of Denmark, Electress of Saxony, and she was the wife of Johann Casimir, who was the Count Palatine of Simmern.

She can be identified as the scribe of multiple manuscripts now preserved in Heidelberg. A comparable case is that of Ippolita Maria Visconti Sforza, who was born in 1445 and died in 1488. She was the daughter of Francesco I Sforza and Bianca Maria Visconti, and she was later Duchess of Calabria through her marriage to Alfonso of Aragon, and she copied at least one manuscript that is now preserved in the British Library.

At the same time, not all non-monastic female scribes belonged to the nobility. Dorothea von Hof of Constance was the daughter of the merchant and guild representative Heinrich Ehinger. She eventually married Georg von Hof, who later served as mayor of Constance. Though closely connected to Dominican communities, particularly the convent of St.

Catherine in St. Gall, um, where she appears as a benefactor, there is no evidence that she ever took vows. Nevertheless, Dorothea von Hof is identifiable as the scribe of at least two complete manuscripts. In Florence, we meet Margherita Soderini, a laywoman from an elite family, and she copies sermons preached in Santa Maria del Fiore.

Her colophon is strikingly self-aware. She takes responsibility for errors, writing, "They would be my fault," while attributing anything good to God.

Quote: In the name of God, on the fourth day of April, 1484. This I have copied for my consolation from the sermons of Master Mariano the Roman, preached during Lent in Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence. If there are errors, it would be my fault. I did not keep them well in memory. I, Margherita, daughter of Messer Tommaso Soderini, wrote this with my own hand.

Whoever reads it, pray to God for me. If it is written well, it was a gift of God, and I thank Him. All good comes from God. All evil is from me

Estelle: Another woman, Mariette Person of Reims, identified herself in two colophons that she wrote in beautiful golden letters. There she explains that she wrote the Book of Hours with her own hand. She also frames her identity in relation to her husband, a professional scribe in the city of Reims

Interviewer: So Estelle, after looking at individual scribes, what happens when we step back and look at the bigger picture? What changes when women are no longer marginal footnotes, but recognized as consistent producers of manuscripts?

Estelle: It changes everything. Once we see women not as rare exceptions, but as active, persistent producers, the familiar narratives of medieval literacy, education, and gender begin to shift.

Take multilingualism, for instance. Medieval Europe was multilingual by default, but scholarly attention has long focused on men, clerics trained in Latin, university scholars, chancery officials. Women, by contrast, were often described as vernacular readers at best, marginal to learned culture until recently.

But the evidence from female scribes tells a very different story. Across Western Europe, women copied, annotated, compiled, and sometimes they translated text in Latin and multiple vernaculars. Latin remains dominant, but many manuscripts are in German, Italian, Dutch, French, Portuguese, um, Castilian, Swedish, and other regional languages.

And even more striking, many women moved across languages rather than working in a single linguistic sphere.

Interviewer: Can you give an example?

Estelle: Absolutely. Um, there is, for instance, Cordula von Schauen, and she was associated with the Abbey of St. Gall in Switzerland. She copied manuscripts where Latin text were interspersed with German prayers for the dead.

Of the nine manuscripts attributed to her, we have several that are explicitly bilingual. Cordula's work shows that women navigated linguistic boundaries freely, and they adapted text to the devotional and pastoral needs of their communities. They weren't just participants in multilingual culture, they were actively shaping it, sustaining it, and transmitting text across generations.

To be precise, when I talk about literacy here, I don't mean authorial originality or perfect grammar in the modern sense. I mean the ability to write or copy a text, sometimes with deep understanding, sometimes through trained familiarity, um, often through embodied practice. And multilingualism appears in many different forms.

There is, for instance, the personal multilingualism, when a woman writes in more than one language. Um, there is also the institutional multilingualism, when a community distributes linguistic labor among different members of the community. And finally, there is textual multilingualism, when multiple languages coexist within a single manuscript

Interviewer: And are there examples from convents that illustrate this?

Estelle: Yes. Um, you can take the Vadstena nuns in Sweden, for instance. At least half of the sisters involved in book production had Latin competence, and nearly half of the surviving manuscripts are in Latin. In German-speaking regions, bilingual prayer books and mixed-language devotional practices were common.

Women could move seamlessly between Latin and vernacular without rigid boundaries. The data set shows that these weren't isolated cases. A significant proportion of manuscripts and scribal units copied by women are multilingual, and this is almost certainly an underestimate. Cataloging practices routinely obscure bilingual features, vernacular rubrics, mixed dialects, secondary language colophons.

And even so, multilingualism emerges as a defining feature of female scribal production, especially from the 15th century onward.

Interviewer: So what does this tell us about women's roles more broadly?

Estelle: Well, it tells us that women acted as cultural mediators. They adapted text for communal use, they bridged learned and vernacular traditions, and they ensured that Latin devotional and theological materials were intelligible and usable within female communities.

This labor was essential, even if rarely named as such. More broadly, it forces us to rethink assumptions about education and authority. Women's literacy was not simply receptive or derivative. Through copying, compiling, organizing, and adapting text, women exercised textual agency. They shaped what was read, how it was read, and by whom.

Recovering female scribes doesn't just add missing names to catalogs. It really alters the map of medieval intellectual life. When women are visible as producers embedded in networks of labor, language, and devotion, the Middle Ages appear less uniform, less hierarchical, and more multilingual, both culturally and intellectually.

Interviewer: So Estelle, after everything we've discussed today, what responsibility do we have now that these women are visible again?

Estelle: Well, for a long time, the absence of women from the history of the medieval book was treated as a fact of the past, something inevitable, even natural. So if women rarely appeared in catalogs or footnotes, it was assumed that they had rarely been there to begin with.

But we have seen that women copied books in convents and cities, in Latin and in vernaculars, alone and in collaboration. They named themselves, they paid for materials, they apologized for errors, they took pride in their labor, and they asked to be remembered. And yet, the structures designed to describe, classify, and search medieval manuscripts were never built to make them visible.

This is what we mean by the silent archive. Silence does not mean absence. It means that certain kinds of labor were not expected, not valued, or not recorded in ways that later generation could easily retrieve. I think we have a responsibility to cite these women, to teach with their manuscripts, and to design tools that do not erase them again.

We have a responsibility to resist the comfort of the default male, and to question what our catalogs, our databases, and research questions take for granted. And I think we have a responsibility to remain honest about uncertainty, about what we cannot know, and about what has been lost, without allowing that uncertainty to become an excuse for silence.

Interviewer: So how do we confront this silence today?

Estelle: In recent years, scholars have begun to face these silences head-on. Public interest in the hidden women of history has grown, but visibility cannot be achieved simply by telling better stories. It requires new methods, new infrastructures, and new questions.

Digital humanities offer powerful tools for that purpose thanks to large-scale cataloging and digitization, which helps identifying women in metadata, but also through new methods like handwritten text recognition and stylometry, as I mentioned earlier. We can also use mapping, network analysis, and other forms of data visualization to get insights into this production.

And recent applications of cultural ecology to manuscript production have also shown how these methods can be applied to estimate what has been lost from the historical record. These make it possible to search a vast corpora, detect patterns, and estimate the scale of phenomena that once seemed immeasurable.

But technology alone does not recover women. Algorithms can only find what we decide to model. If metadata assumes scribes are male by default, computation reproduces that bias at scale. Human judgment, feminist critic, and historically informed data modeling remain essential.

Interviewer: And this is where your project, Unknown Hands, comes in?

Estelle: Exactly. Unknown Hands does not claim to offer a definitive list of medieval female scribes, nor to resolve structural inequalities embedded in archives. Unknown Hands doesn't try to fix archives. Instead, it functions as a counter-archive, an archive created specifically to fill gaps and silences in the official record, and to promote new perspectives on historical evidence.

Its purpose is to make women's scribal labor visible, to consolidate scattered, uneven, and sometimes uncertain data about their work in one place. We're not aiming for completeness. We're aiming for patterns, the ability to see how women worked across manuscripts, across monasteries, and over time. This way, it brings scattered, partial, and often uncertain evidence into a shared open framework.

What becomes visible is not just individual women, but magnitude. Even conservative estimates suggest that women were responsible for tens of thousands of manuscripts in medieval Europe. These books shaped devotional life, education, and textural transmission for generations. To continue treating their producers as marginal is no longer a matter of ignorance, it is a choice.

Recovering female scribes does not complete the story of the medieval book, it complicates it. It makes it messier, more multilingual, more collaborative, and more human. And in doing so, it reminds us that history is not only what survives, it is what we choose to see

Interviewer: In this episode, we've primarily focused on Christian Europe.

So as a way to conclude, are you able to tell us a bit more about other religions or cultures?

Estelle: Of course. Um, my project tells only part of the story. While, uh, it focuses on Western Christian Europe, women were also participating in manuscript cultures far beyond it. Uh, Greek colophons, for instance, preserve the voices of figures like Theodora, Raoulina, or Zoe, who collaborated in copying liturgical books in 13th century Byzantium.

Hebrew sources also revealed Jewish women acting as copyists, commissioners, and readers, their names surviving in brief notes at the end of manuscripts that hint at family workshops and devotional networks. These traces remind us that women's scribal labor was never confined to a single linguistic or religious sphere.

The unknown hands we recover there belong to a wider interconnected history of writing, one that stretches across cultures, scripts, and traditions, and that is only beginning to come into view. So my project, Unknown Hands, is really an invitation to scholars, to students, and to the public to look again at the medieval book and to search for the hands that were always there.

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