What did it mean to be a professional scribe in the Middle Ages? What kinds of evidence exist to illustrate how ‘bookish’ a small, impoverished community might be? How can we find out more about women scribes and women’s literacy in a period with so little explicit information? As Neil Ripley Ker and other palaeographers have indicated, Mortuary Rolls with lists of prayers written by religious institutions—large and small—offer a significant insight into their respective moments of production. Handwriting variety is key among the features that make these textual objects so important, but there is so much more to be discovered in the Rolls’ compilation and arrangement. This paper will highlight layout, punctuation, abbreviation, style of hands, and decoration—and will emphasize how digital tools allow for quantification of palaeographical features that reveal surprising patterns of scribal practice. In sum, I aim to show the advantages of studying what might be described as ‘everyday writing’, with its differing aesthetics, expertises, and consequences for scholarly interpretation of communities of literacy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Elaine Treharne is Roberta Bowman Denning Professor of Humanities and Professor of English, at Stanford University in the USA. Originally from Wales, she studied for her BA and PhD in the Department of English at the University of Manchester. She specializes in manuscript studies, archives, information technologies, and early British literature with current projects focusing on death and trauma, on manuscripts and the cataloguing work of Neil Ripley Ker, and on the history of writing systems. Recent major publications include Disrupting Categories, 1050 to 1250: Rethinking the Humanities through Premodern Texts (ARC Humanities Press, 2024); Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book (Oxford University Press, 2021); and The Cambridge Companion to British Medieval Manuscripts, co-edited with Orietta Da Rold (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Professor Treharne is based in Oxford this semester with research fellowships at Magdalen College and at The Bodleian Libraries.