SMC 39Female Agency in Manuscript Cultures

10 June 2024

Photo: De Gruyter

Manuscript cultures have frequently forgotten, neglected, or even erased women’s contributions from memory. The new volume of ‘Studies in Manuscript Cultures’ highlights women’s various roles in and complex contributions to the production of written artefacts.

Women’s contributions to our written cultural heritage are still underrepresented in written artefact research. On the one hand, this is due to an imbalance in the source material: historically, women in many cultures had less access to education than men. Reading and writing were often skills that were mainly reserved for men, especially those in higher educational classes. Men dominated the religious and administrative institutions where many manuscripts were produced and archived. On top of this, manuscripts by women were less likely to be kept, copied, and passed on. When women did produce manuscripts, they were often not as well protected or recognised as the works of men, which is why their share of surviving manuscripts is smaller.

However, the insufficient appreciation of the importance of women in manuscript cultures is also due to the blind spots of research itself. For a long time, the possibility of a female scribes was rarely even considered in the case of anonymously transmitted sources. Written artefacts that were attributed to men could in many cases actually have been produced by women. And even where women did not appear as scribes, they may have played an important role in their production, publication, dissemination, and preservation, which is inadequately depicted in prevailing historical accounts. 

Female Agency in Manuscript Cultures, the recently published new volume in the Studies in Manuscript Cultures series, attempts to address this incomplete understanding by exploring the different and overlapping ways in which women acted as autonomous agents in manuscript cultures through a range of case studies. At the same time, the volume sheds light on the challenges and obstacles that women faced in various cultural and historical contexts and that stood in their way of developing this autonomy.

‘Female agency is not the “rare and exceptional other” but a decisive factor when it comes to our understanding of manuscript cultures in general’, writes Eike Großmann, editor of this volume, in her foreword. To underpin this, the contributions in the volume show the different roles in which women were involved in the production of written artefacts. These include not only the obvious cases in which women acted as scribes or copyists, but also many others in which, for example, they commissioned manuscripts, supervised their production, or collected them. Großmann distinguishes a total of seven such roles in her typology that introduces the volume.

Like all contributions in this series, the book is available open access and can be downloaded from the publisher’s website, as can all individual contributions.