Unknown Hands is a research project that identifies, documents, and visualizes the work of female scribes in Christian Europe before 1600. It brings together codicology, paleography, and digital humanities to collate evidence that has long been scattered or overlooked. The result is a growing, open resource for researchers, librarians, and the wider public.

Why this project?

Women’s contributions to manuscript culture are substantially understudied. Names are missing; attributions are uneven; descriptions are lacunary, multilingual work is often invisible in catalogues. Unknown Hands addresses this gap by:

• consolidating evidence across libraries, regions, and languages.
• modeling uncertainty explicitly rather than smoothing it away.
• cataloguing for both human and machine reading.
• publishing a searchable open dataset and visualizations that make patterns legible at scale.
• connecting communities of scholars, curators and students working on gender studies and female production to keep developing the dataset and develop collaborations.

Scope & Curation

• Geography & period: Western Christian Europe, pre-1600 (monastic and lay contexts).
• Materials: Manuscripts and fragments; documentary items when they witness scribal labor.
• Inclusions: Named female scribes; anonymous hands plausibly attributable to women; collaborative production where women’s roles can be argued from evidence.
• Exclusions: Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac and other non-Western European languages for now (by design, due to language coverage and project scale); documents of the practice (charters when not bound as a book, letters, etc.); printed books.

Data are compiled from catalogues, archival descriptions, published scholarship, institutional records, and first-hand examination where possible. Each claim includes, where feasible:

• citation(s) and, where feasible, page/folio references;
• provenance of the data (who asserted it, when);
• notes on dissenting views or alternative readings.

We welcome corrections and additions from librarians, scholars, curators, students, and communities of practice.

Some Guidelines

We encode the strength of evidence for each attribution so users can filter and interpret responsibly:

• High - explicit colophon/signature or converging documentary proof.
• Medium - strong palaeographical/prosopographical argument; partial documentary support.
• Low - suggestive but incomplete indicators (context, paratexts, institutional practice).

Uncertain fields (dates, places, identifications) carry text qualifiers and ranges to account for uncertainty.

Many women worked across Latin and vernaculars or multiple dialects. We record:

• languages at different descriptive levels.
• known/likely dialects or script habits.
• translation or adaptation roles when identifiable.

This enables analysis of literacy, training, and audience beyond a single language label.

We also encode data about paleography, codicology, text identification, prosopography, etc.

Data not included at this point includes:

• Decoration information;
• Detailed information about textual variants.

Ethics & Care

Unknown Hands is directed by Estelle Guéville (Yale University) with the support of colleagues and friends in manuscript studies and digital humanities. See the Team page for advisors, collaborators, and acknowledgments.

We aim to represent people’s work accurately and respectfully. When records include sensitive details or contested attributions, we document the basis, allow for disagreement, and respond to takedown/correction requests. Contact us for concerns.

• Site content: CC BY-NC-SA (please attribute Unknown Hands and author: Estelle Guéville).
• Data: CC BY-NC-SA.

Please cite as: Unknown Hands: Female Scribes in Pre-Modern Europe, ed. Estelle Guéville, v.1.1 (2025), https://estellegueville.com/unknownhands.

Get Involved

• Share corrections or new evidence.
• Contribute records from your collection.
• Collaborate on case studies, teaching modules, or visualization ideas.

We aim to develop collaborations and we welcome participation of scholars working on subjects beyond the scope of this project. Feel free to share with us data about languages not currently included in the dataset.

See Contact for how to reach us and Participate to get involved in the project.