- ISSN: 0929-8592
- E-ISSN: 2667-1689
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oa Participants in the Periphery?
Female Scribes and Commercial Book Production in the Later Middle Ages
- Amsterdam University Press
- Source: Queeste, Volume 32, Issue 1, Oct 2025, p. 160 - 175
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- 01 Oct 2025
Abstract
The allogenetic composite manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Can. misc. 278 comprises three multilingual booklets, probably all produced in Bruges in the 1460/70s. The booklet covering folios 97–128 ends with a colophon dated 17 February 1467 in which the scribe requests prayers ‘for her who has written this’, followed by the signature ‘per me SR’. It is the only known colophon from a Middle Dutch manuscript attributed to a secular female scribe and one of the rare examples of such attribution to female scribes in the late Middle Ages. Attempts to identify her through the records of the librarians’ guild in Bruges, which date from the second half of the fifteenth century, have yielded no result. The register reveals that around 1480, women made up twenty-five percent of the members, with some being self-employed and taking on female apprentices. However, there is no specific mention of female scribes — let alone the one who signed her work with ‘per me SR’. Her colophon refers only to the set of Middle Dutch didactic texts that were added to a booklet originally consisting of two quires containing a Latin-French Disticha Catonis, followed by some short French texts. This original booklet, to which a third quire was added, was copied by a different scribe. The question of whether ‘SR’ — assuming these initials do refer to her name — was a professional scribe is not necessarily complicated by the fact that the manuscript, now totaling three quires and 32 folios in total, was not produced in a single operation. Nor does the request for prayer conflict with the conclusion that this extended codicological unit was produced on commission for an urban clientele. The rather professional execution of the ‘first’ booklet, comprising two quires, and its later extension by the female scribe, suggest that the manuscript, now the third section of MS Can. misc. 278, may have resulted from a commercial cooperation between two scriptoria within the Bruges book trade during the second half of the fifteenth century. The colophon, however, provides evidence only that women acted as professional scribes in this industry.
