When people talk about women in the workplace, more often than not they discuss it as a new phenomenon. Women, we are given to understand, emerged to gain a foothold in the office as a part of the ...

A curious thing happened in the middle of the 14th century. According to Henry Knighton's Chronicle, an English narrative completed at Leicester by ca. 1400 CE, in the year 1348 a group of about 40-50 ...

For centuries, the image of a monk hunched over a desk, painstakingly copying manuscripts by candlelight, has dominated our perception of scholarship in the Middle Ages. But what about the women? A ...

1. In 1405, Christine de Pizan, a writer at the French court, was fed up. “I could hardly find a book on morals where, even ...

Before the first printing press was invented in the 15th century, books had to be made by hand. It was the monks who were usually put to work making parchment and ink, writing out text, and binding ...

In popular imagination, scribes and manuscript illuminators of the Middle Ages were men: Monks hard at work in candlelit scriptoria, busy copying the world’s knowledge onto parchment pages. “It’s ...

Medieval Europe was a place of great emotional incontinence, so much so that historian Johan Huizinga once claimed, “Modern man has … no idea of the unrestrained extravagance of the medieval heart.” ...

Medieval women viewed birthing girdles, or long pieces of parchment inscribed with religious invocations and drawings, as protective talismans. Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection Giving birth during ...