![]() ![]() They estimated that the woman was between 45 and 60 years old when she died, and, with help from physicists at the University of York, identified the blue particles as lapis lazuli. The bright blue particle’s discovery was an accident: in 2014, the team had been searching for plant remains in dental plaque to study their medieval subjects’ diets. Recordkeeping at medieval women’s monasteries was limited, as are surviving manuscripts, but scholars have identified 4,000 books attributed to more than 400 women scribes working at German monasteries between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, the study reports.įoundations of the church associated with a medieval women’s religious community at Dalheim, Germany. ![]() The Dalheim monastery was destroyed in a fire during the fourteenth century, leaving scant evidence of work its residents might have done there. “The growing economy of eleventh-century Europe fired demand for the precious and exquisite pigment that traveled thousands of miles via merchant caravan and ships to serve this woman artist’s creative ambition.” McCormick chairs Harvard’s Initiative for the Science of the Human Past, an interdisciplinary research program that often collaborates with the Max Planck Institute, combining insights from the humanities and natural sciences to better understand human history. The woman discovered at Dalheim “was plugged into a vast global commercial network stretching from the mines of Afghanistan to her community in medieval Germany through the trading metropolises of Islamic Egypt and Byzantine Constantinople,” Michael McCormick, Goelet professor of medieval history and a co-author of the paper, said in a news release. This adds dramatically and vividly to the growing body of evidence for the role of women in producing books in the Middle Ages.” “What makes B78’s teeth so special,” she added, “is that they provide material evidence of her activities (as we argue) as a user of ultramarine pigment over a consider period of time. “Still, the popular image of the monk as the scribe and artist is quite resilient, and changing a priori assumptions about male production, use, and ownership of books in the monasteries of medieval Europe-sometimes even within the field of Medieval Studies - is still sometimes a challenge. ![]() “A number of scholars have made considerable progress towards identifying female scribes and book painters from the Middle Ages and understanding their contributions to manuscript production in the past few decades,” co-author Alison Beach, a history professor at the Ohio State University, wrote in an email. Recent evidence has challenged this assumption: twelfth-century correspondence between a monk and women’s monastery, for example, not far from the monastery at Dalheim, has shown that the production of deluxe manuscripts, using expensive materials, was outsourced to women scribes. Few illuminated manuscripts were signed by their creators, but those that have a signature were usually signed by men. Historians have long assumed that monks rather than nuns were the main producers of books in medieval Europe. ’10, of the Max Planck Institute, and co-authors, suggest she was a skilled manuscript painter, providing the earliest direct evidence of the pigment’s use by a woman in Germany ( Updated January 10, 2019, to reflect the names of the lead authors of this study). The findings, published this week in Science Advances by co-first authors Anita Radini of the University of York and Monica Tromp of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, senior author Christina Warinner, Ph.D. Recently, researchers discovered the remains of lapis lazuli in the calcified dental plaque of a woman (identified as B78), buried in the cemetery of a small women’s monastery in Dalheim, in western Germany, between 9. The pigment’s travels reflect the activity of merchants and artists around the world. Blue pigment rarely occurs in nature, making the rock exceptionally expensive in medieval Europe, where the pigment was used to illustrate the most luxurious illuminated manuscripts, it was as valuable as gold. For centuries, people from South Asia to Mesopotamia to Europe have traded lapis lazuli, a brilliant blue rock used to make ultramarine pigment, found in mines in present-day Afghanistan. ![]()
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