A medieval woman with lapis lazuli pigment trapped in her dental calculus has already rewritten what historians thought they knew about women’s role in art. This project expands that discovery into a systematic investigation of premodern women’s work and health in European monastic communities. The problem is that written records systematically undercount women’s skilled labour. Skeletal remains and dental calculus preserve direct physical evidence of craft activities—repeated gestures, inhaled pigments, joint stress—that documents never mention. By combining historical manuscript analysis with bioarchaeology, experimental archaeology, and materials science, the team will recover stories that have been invisible for centuries. This is fundamental curiosity-driven research. It has no immediate practical application for infrastructure or medicine. But the 2019 discovery that a woman produced illuminated manuscripts—work long assumed to be exclusively male—demonstrates how such research upends entrenched assumptions. If successful, this project will provide the first fine-grained picture of what work actually did to women’s bodies: which crafts damaged joints, which pigments poisoned lungs, and how social hierarchies within religious communities shaped health outcomes. The impact is a more accurate history of human labour, and a challenge to the gendered narratives that still shape how we value work today.
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Woman, or Master? What can new evidence for skilled craft and artistic production in premodern Europe reveal about women's work and health? In 2019, PI Alison Beach and International Co-I Anita Radini were part of an interdisciplinary team that identified a medieval female artist from her skeletal remains for the very first time using cutting-edge techniques in bioarchaeology, upending common assumptions about the role of women in art [1]. In this extraordinary collaboration, Beach's expert historical work on book production linked the repeated gestures of a medieval artist to Radini's bioarchaeological data. The remarkable response to this discovery of a religious woman with lapis lazuli pigment in her dental calculus reflects the enormous academic and public interest in this line of research. The original article in Science Advances has been downloaded over 9,000 times, and the team's collaborative work was selected as one of the Top Ten Discoveries of 2019 by Archaeology Magazine. The image of a medieval woman shaping her pigment-suffused paintbrush with her lips has also inspired several novels and even a sonnet, The Artist, by the award-winning poet Erin Redfern. "Let's ask her," Redfern proposes. "Are you Woman, or Master?" Given voice through the combined power of the humanities and science, she answers: I was both - woman and master. By extending this powerful partnership between historians and archaeological scientists, we will give voice to other premodern European women, and through the multivocality of our own cross-disciplinary approaches, provide novel and nuanced insights into their lived experiences. The proposed project will recover, contextualise, and synthesise their stories, providing an unprecedentedly fine-grained picture of women's work and occupational health in monastic contexts. Moving between the library and laboratory, we will integrate historical research with cutting-edge analysis of human remains, experimental archaeology, and materials analysis to transform the way we see women in the European past. With an integrated multiscalar approach, we will seek to answer the following primary research questions: RQ1. In what skilled craft and artistic activities did women in premodern religious communities engage? RQ2. What impact did work have on the bodies and health of these religious women? RQ3. Did the socio-cultural context of religious women determine their participation/lack thereof in particular activities? What impact did inequalities among women have on their health? In asking and answering these questions, we will challenge gendered narratives about the nature and scope of the artistic and economic activities of premodern women (objective of RQ1); discern the physical traces left by craft and artistic labour from those left by religious labour (e.g., extensive kneeling in prayer) (objective of RQ2); and evaluate the evidence for social inequality among religious women, both prior to entry and within the religious community, and the impact of those inequalities on health (objective of RQ3). [1] Radini et al. (2019). Medieval women's early involvement in manuscript production suggested by lapis lazuli identification in dental calculus. Science Advances 5 (1).
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