This project is currently developed and maintained by Estelle Guéville (Yale University) with the advice and support of colleagues in manuscript studies and digital humanities.

Project Director

Estelle Guéville is the founder and director of Unknown Hands. She is a historian of the medieval book, with a career spanning museums, libraries, and universities. Her research explores manuscripts, scribal practices, illumination, gender, and cultural exchange, often through the lens of digital humanities and quantitative analysis. Her work includes textual analysis (distant reading, handwritten text recognition, stylometry), visual analysis (neural networks, image processing, feature detection), and spatial approaches (GIS, mapping). Her doctoral research focuses on female scribes in Christian Europe before 1600, with a particular interest in multilingualism, codicology, and the use of digital methods for manuscript studies. She has developed the first large-scale dataset of manuscripts copied by women and is building a digital infrastructure to make these contributions accessible to scholars and the public. She has published in several peer-reviewed journals, and her co-authored book with Dr. Wrisley, Medieval Manuscripts and the Computational Humanities : Big Data, Scribes, and the “Paris Bible,” is under contract with Arc Humanities Press.

Academic Advisors

The project benefits from the guidance and advice of scholars in medieval studies and digital humanities:

• Dr. Jessica Brantley
• Dr. Alex Gil
• Dr. Agnieszka Rec

Collaborators

Over the course of development, Unknown Hands has been shaped by the input of colleagues, librarians, and fellow researchers:

• Dr. Cynthia Cyrus, who kindly shared the dataset used in her book The scribes for women’s convents in late medieval Germany.
• Dr. Jennifer Carnell, Cataloguer of Western Manuscripts at the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, who continually shares her discoveries of female scribes and has helped shape the cataloguing principles used in the project.
• Dr. Mercedes Pérez Vidal, who helped enrich the Spanish production.
• Dr. Paula Cardoso, who helped enrich the Portuguese production she studied in her PhD dissertation entitled Art, Reform and Female Agency in the Portuguese Dominican Nunneries: Nuns as Producers and Patrons of Illuminated Manuscripts (c. 1460-1560)
• Dr. Melissa Moreton who provided material about the Italian production.

We also want to acknowledge Dr. David Joseph Wrisley, Dr. Lauren Tilton, Dr. Laura Saetveit Miles, and Dr. Montserrat Cabré i Pairet for their support.

We are also grateful for all the other informal collaborations, conversations, and shared expertise that continue to enrich the project on a daily basis.

Support and Recognition

This project has been supported by fellowships, awards, and grants, including:

• MacMillan International Dissertation Research Fellowship, Yale University (2025)
• Bourse Mark Pigott – Humanités Numériques, Bibliothèque nationale de France (2025)
• International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA) Student Travel Grant (2025)
• Latin American and Iberian Studies Summer Travel Grant, Yale University (2025)
• Max Kade Summer Study & Travel Award, Yale University and Max Kade Foundation (2025)
• Sterling Prize Fellowship, Yale University (2022–24)
• MacMillan Center Pre-Dissertation Research Fellowship, Yale University (2022)

Affiliations

Funding & Fellowships

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