Also Worth Pointing Out That Plenty Of Men In Monastaries Did Textile And Fibre Arts - Blog Posts

This article does make an assumption that I would like to push back on. My area of passion are manuscripts of the British isles from before the Norman Conquest ("Insular" is the term for this style). I am also not a scholar - I am just a calligrapher.

We have no idea who wrote almost all the manuscripts from this period. We can tell roughly how many people worked on something by comparing stylistic differences, but we know almost nothing about those people. Often we don't even know where they were.

In this case we know a delightful amount about the provenance of the manuscript! The monastic gender roles being discussed are extremely over simplified though. Please make sure you do not assume that any other monastary in any other place or time functions like this. The diversity of monastic traditions is staggering and the time period we're talking about spans more than a millenium.

There is no support for the assumption that all calligraphy and manuscript decoration was done by men. In insular calligraphy I'm not even sure you can assume that that was the norm. It is a painfully common assumption, but it comes from the same kind of science and hisotry that identified the sex of archeological remains in northern Europe by whether or not they had a sword, and then claimed that only men have swords.

medieval parchment repairs

in a psalter, south-western germany, late 12th/early 13th c.

source: Hermetschwil, Benediktinerinnenkloster, Cod. membr. 37, fol. 19r, 53r, and 110r