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Abstract

This article deals with women's contribution to the book production in the Low Countries in the 14th and 15th centuries and the ways in which one might find out about it. The paper considers the state of the art and some of the local- and time bound circumstances favouring the involvement of women in the production of handwritten books.

From the early Middle Ages on, copying manuscripts was a typical activity in the monasteries of the Low Countries. But copyists are nearly always anonymous since the men and women involved seldom signed their work. We know very few names of medieval copyists, and women's names are particularly scarce.

Depictions of women while writing are extremely rare in medieval iconography. Representations of them are always linked to (intellectual) women authors and not to simple copyists.

Nevertheless, in the case of the Low Countries, there are some signs which encourage research on women copyists. The well-organized basic education of girls, the possibilities they had to become apprentices and later members of craft guilds involved in the production of books, and the numerous cloisters where novices where taught to copy and illustrate books are important aspects. In this paper I also pay attention to other circumstances such as the growth of the bookselling market, the growing demand for books in the vernacular bythe laity and the overwhelming success of the religious movement called "Devotio Moderna" whose followers were book addicts. The palaeographic study of some known women's handwriting is one of the research approaches to be considered.