About me

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the Ohio University in Columbus. My research focuses on medieval religious women and on monastic communities more generally. My recent book, The Trauma of Monastic Reform: Community and Conflict in Twelfth-Century Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2017) looks at the real human impact that medieval monastic reform could have, not only on the individuals who comprised a target community as the reformers arrived, but also on those who lived, sometimes for several generations, in its aftermath.

My first book, Women as Scribes: Book Production and Monastic Reform in Twelfth-Century Bavaria (Cambridge University Press, 2004; paperback 2010) examines women’s participation in the intellectual and spiritual life of the high Middle Ages. Surprisingly, very little had been done on this topic. While a few great women thinkers such as Heloise and Hildegard of Bingen had been highlighted by previous research, there had been little systematic study of the everyday participation of more ordinary women in the spiritual and intellectual transformations of the twelfth century. By focusing on the scriptorium – the writing office – of a number of monasteries, I showed that religious women participated actively in book production and knew how to read and write. Many engaged in the devotional study of the Bible, with some creating written works of exegesis. That we have known little about these literate women can, in part, be attributed to the anonymity enforced by the culture in which they lived and worked, and perpetuated by the assumptions of modern historians.

The work of female scribes and book painters has attracted considerable attention with the recent release of a paper in Science Advances (which I co-authored) on the discovery of a medieval religious woman with lapis lazuli pigment layered in her dental calculus — a find that suggests that she was a painter of luxurious manuscripts. The lapis was discovered and identified by a great team of scientists at the Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Human History in Jena and the University of York. This blog is partly a response to the public interest in women and book production that this study sparked!

You can find more on my research on female scribes and other things medieval on my webpage: http://abeach.org