Oliver Smithies Lecture 1 - Death of a Nun: Medieval Women Scribes and Networks of Piety
Professor Elaine Treharne (Oliver Smithies Visiting Lecturer/Stanford)
What did it mean to be a professional scribe in the Middle Ages? What kinds of evidence exist to illustrate how ‘bookish’ a small, impoverished community might be? How can we find out more about women scribes and women’s literacy in a period with so little explicit information? Mortuary rolls (such as Cambridge, St John’s College, MS N.31) — or medieval Books of Condolence — with lists of prayers written by multiple religious institutions offer a significant insight into their respective moments of production. This paper will explore what might be described as ‘everyday writing’ of women and men, with its differing aesthetics, expertise, and consequences for scholarly interpretation of communities of literacy in the 12th and 13th centuries.
Refreshments will be available after the lecture.
Professor Elaine Treharne is Roberta Bowman Denning Professor of Humanities at Stanford University, and Oliver smithies Visiting Lecturer at Oxford.
