Guest professorship ‘Women in Manuscript Cultures’‘We Have to Consider the Possibility of Female Scribes’

1 November 2023

Photo: Julia Bruch

Julia Bruch, the new guest professor for ‘Women in Manuscript Cultures’, gives insights into the research questions she will investigate at CSMC: are there fundamental differences between the manuscripts of men and women? And can we attribute anonymously transmitted texts to men across the board?

Julia Bruch, where are normally based and how did you get involved with the CSMC?

I am a postdoc at the Research Training Group ‘Dynamics of Conventionality (400–1550)’ at the University of Cologne. A common focus there is textuality, a theme that has also been running through my own research ever since I started. During my habilitation project on craftsmen’s chronicles from the 15th and 16th centuries, I became aware of the CSMC through Ulla Kypta. From the distance, the concept of ‘manuscript cultures’ that is being used here gave me an impulse for my work. That is why it’s great to be here now.

What are your plans for your time here?

There is a topic that has interested me for a long time, but that I haven’t engaged with systematically yet: historians typically assume that anonymously transmitted manuscripts were written by men; they do not even consider the possibility that the scribe could be a woman. I want to challenge this presumption. I am currently working on the chronicle of a female brewer, which I will also present in my lecture on 7 December. This chronicle is about the female rather than the male ancestors, which is extraordinary. While I am here, I want to look closely at other manuscripts that can be clearly attributed to women, and compare them with manuscripts that can be clearly attributed to men. I am looking at both the content and the material: how are these manuscripts made, are there differences in the style of handwriting, the layout, the binding? I am focusing on German-language manuscripts from the 15th and 16th centuries and the urban milieu, but will draw on manuscripts from different social groups, including craftspeople, the patrician class, monasteries, and merchants . The question is whether there are fundamental differences between manuscripts of men and women.

Can you already share some insights on this question?

Among craftsmen and merchants, many women kept business and account records for their husbands. They thus received a rather thorough education in reading, writing, and probably also calculating. We also assume that they, at least in part, attended the same schools as men and were therefore taught a similar writing style and ways to produce a book. Accordingly, my hypothesis is that we cannot speak of a genuine ‘female manuscript culture’, but that there was a common writing culture across gender boundaries. The point is this: if the manuscripts of men and women are so similar, then we must reconsider the common practice of assigning all anonymously transmitted manuscripts from this period to men.

I can already see many points of common interest: how is information collected, how is it written down, and how do these processes differ between women and men?

Might there be other clues to distinguish these manuscripts if this cannot be done on basis of their content and material properties?

One approach is to look in much more detail at the history of transmission: if a manuscript comes from a men’s monastery, it is of course much more like to have been written by a man. But even that is not certain: men’s monasteries often relied on the women’s monasteries for the production of manuscripts. In general, I think that this mutual exchange is still not taken into account enough. We still consider the life worlds of men and women in the Middle Ages very separately.

How do you hope to benefit from your colleagues at the CSMC, and to which research fields of the Cluster do you want to contribute to?

I have already attended a meeting of the ‘Keeping Note(book)s’ group and think that it suits me very well. I can already see many points of common interest: how is information collected, how is it written down, and how do these processes differ between women and men? From Cologne, I am used to interdisciplinary discussions, but at least we are all medievalists there. Here, there is also the wide range of time and space. At the beginning, I was not so sure whether I would be able to contribute anything at all to research projects in African Studies, for example. But the first few days here showed me that it works. In the end, the research problems we are dealing with and the methods we use to address them are not so different. I find that very inspiring.