3/26/2023 0 Comments Ancient manuscripts crossword![]() Beach also identified a book using lapis lazuli that was written by a female scribe in Germany around a.d. The monastery where sister “N” lived is only 40 miles from Dalheim, where the teeth with lapis lazuli were found. But a small number of surviving manuscripts are signed by women, and scholars have found correspondence between monks and nuns about book production.īeach even came across a letter dated to the year 1168, in which a bookkeeper of a men’s monastery commissions sister “N” to produce a deluxe manuscript using luxury materials such as parchment, leather, and silk. The challenge, Beach says, is that while most manuscripts with signatures are signed by men, the vast majority of manuscripts are unsigned. Over the past couple of decades, Beach and other scholars have cataloged the overlooked contributions of women to medieval book production. Warinner eventually reached out to Alison Beach, a historian at Ohio State University who studies female scribes in 12th-century Germany. One suggested to Warinner that this woman came into contact with ultramarine because she was simply the cleaning lady. Some dismissed the idea that a woman could have been a painter skilled enough to work with ultramarine. We tried reaching out to physicists, and they were like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ We tried reaching out to people working in art restoration, and they were like, ‘Why are you working with plaque?’” She eventually reached physicists at the University of York who helped confirm the blue did indeed come from the mineral lazurite, derived from lapis lazuli.īut art experts were still skeptical. ![]() Can you help me?’ People thought we were crazy. “‘Hi, I’m working with this thing on teeth, and it’s about 1,000 years old, and it has blue stuff in it. “Can you imagine the kind of cold calls we had to make in the beginning?” says Warinner. The semiprecious rock lapis lazuli is ground up to create a pigment called ultramarine, tiny particles of which can be found in dental tartar. But the blue particles were too striking to ignore. Radini, now at the University of York, was initially interested in starch granules in tartar as a proxy for diet, and Warinner, a microbiome researcher at the Max Planck Institute, wanted to study the DNA of ancient oral bacteria. ![]() Radini and her co-author, Christina Warinner, did not set out to study the production of illuminated manuscripts. “It’s opening up a new avenue in archaeology.” You could imagine identifying metalworkers, carpenters, and other artisans from the particles embedded in tartar, Clarke says. “This is genuinely a big deal,” says Mark Clarke, a technical art historian at Nova University Lisbon who was not involved in the new study. If pigments can be preserved in tartar-the gunky yellow stuff on teeth that dental plaque hardens into-that means that fibers, metals, and other dyes could be, too. Read: Sampling DNA from a 1,000-year-old illuminated manuscript And some of these women must have been very good, if they were using pigment as precious and rare as ultramarine. In the medieval ages, nuns also produced the famously laborious and beautiful books. And so these embedded blue particles in her teeth illuminate a forgotten history of medieval manuscripts: Not just monks made them. According to radiocarbon dating, she lived around 997 to 1162, and she was buried at a women’s monastery in Dalheim, Germany. Who was that person? A woman, first of all. ![]() ![]() And the teeth that were embedded with this blue likely belonged to a scribe or painter of medieval manuscripts. It was used, most notably, to give the Virgin Mary’s robes their striking color in centuries of artwork. This blue was once worth its weight in gold. It was ultramarine, she would later learn, a pigment that a millennium ago could only have come from lapis lazuli originating in a single region of Afghanistan. What Anita Radini noticed under the microscope was the blue-a brilliant blue that seemed so unnatural, so out of place in the 1,000-year-old dental tartar she was gently dissolving in weak acid. ![]()
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