Two years ago the Getty Center in LA showed a collection of illuminated manuscripts with a focus on what they could tell us about the lives of women in the Middle Ages. The richly illustrated prayer books and religious texts provide a window into the themes that dominated in those early years – childbirth, obedience, self-sacrifice.

Tracing the Lives of Women in Medieval Manuscript Illustrations

Women themselves, mostly connected to nunneries but not always, were involved in creating these books. According to scientists about 4,000 books produced between 1200 and 1500 CE can be attributed to 400 specific female scribes in Germany alone, involved in both transcription and painting the illustrations.

For anything before 1100 CE not much is known, only about 1% of the few surviving manuscript can be linked to women artists. Fast forward to a skeleton find in North-Rhine Westphalia: the woman turns out to have a blue tooth, when examined. She lived sometime between 997 and 1162 CE, according to radiocarbon dating of her teeth, at a small women’s monastery called Dalheim.

The blue flecks of lazurite came with microscopic bits of a clear mineral called phlogopite, another ingredient in lapis lazuli. It’s rich in iron and magnesium, and it’s possible to trace the ratio of those two elements to specific mining spots in northeast Afghanistan. Using this, Warinner and her colleagues could eventually be able to tell exactly where Dalheim’s scribes and painters got their pigment.The team found lazurite particles embedded in the calculus on several of the unnamed woman’s teeth, which suggests that licking the tip of her brush was a habit she practiced over a long period of time.

The mineral was used for the intense blues, often associated with the Virgin Mary’s cloak, found in the manuscripts. It was a rare and expensive substance available only to the most highly skilled illustrators. Anthropologists had originally investigated the plaque of this woman to determine medieval diet. The finding of lapis flecks led to the illustrator hypothesis, somewhat confirmed by the status of the artist’s bones: no hard physical labor or disease for her, living to the then ripe age of 60ish. https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/01/medieval-illuminated-manuscripts-were-also-womens-work/

Lesson #1: Scrupulously floss if you don’t want anthropologists to get to your life’s history.

Lesson#2: Our views of gendered (or racial) history might change if we are able to accrue and publish sufficient data. This is not just a question of having the scientific tools. Look at this fascinating discussion of the political issues inherent to the publication of anthropological findings: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/magazine/ancient-dna-paleogenomics.html

Photographs today are from Heinsberg, North-Rhine Westphalia (a staunchly catholic state,) a small market town close to the village of my childhood. It had barely changed when I visited some 40 years later.

Music, since we drew the arc from female spiders, to female war photographers to female illustrators this week: a medieval woman composer, Hildegard von Bingen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6qFCYRQKVA