Blue specks in a medieval woman's teeth suggest she painted books
A woman aged somewhere between 45 and 60 was buried at a monastery in Dalheim, in Germany. Radiocarbon dating places her burial between AD 997 and 1162. Nearly a thousand years later, researchers put the tartar from her teeth under a microscope and found flecks of brilliant blue.
The blue was lazurite, the mineral behind ultramarine. It came from a single region of Afghanistan, and the pigment was as costly as gold. Only scribes and painters of exceptional skill, the authors write, would have been trusted with it. Anita Radini, Christina Warinner and colleagues published the find in Science Advances in 2019. Their simplest explanation: she painted books and licked her brush to bring it to a fine point. She could also have ground the pigment, or swallowed powdered stone as medicine, but the team rates the first less likely and the second unlikely.
Fewer than one in a hundred books made before the 12th century can be attributed to a woman. Scribes often left their work unsigned, and the monastery, home to about 14 religious women, burned down in the 14th century. We know of no book she worked on. Those blue specks may be the only surviving trace that women wrote and painted books there at all.
Her name is in no manuscript. What's left is a trace of blue on her teeth.
Sources
- Radini A., Tromp M., Beach A., Tong E., Speller C., McCormick M., Dudgeon J.V., Collins M.J., Rühli F., Kröger R., Warinner C. Medieval women's early involvement in manuscript production suggested by lapis lazuli identification in dental calculus. Science Advances, 2019; 5(1): eaau7126. doi:10.1126/sciadv.aau7126