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 ...

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 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 ...

At first glance, the writer of an eighth-century biography of Saints Willibald and Winnebald offers few clues regarding her identity, describing herself only as an “unworthy Saxon woman.” Upon closer ...

Tiny particles of the precious pigment lapis lazuli found in the teeth of a medieval woman suggest she was a scribe producing high-quality illustrated manuscripts. The discovery adds to evidence that ...

German archaeologists discovered that the skulls of three medieval Viking women found on the Swedish island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea showed evidence of an unusual procedure to elongate their ...