John Coffin Memorial Lecture in Palaeography 2025

Mortuary Rolls as Evidence of Scribal Practice

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 lecture 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 at Stanford University and Director of Stanford Text Technologies. Her recent publications include Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book (2021), and Disrupting Categories, 1050-1250: Rethinking the Humanities Through Premodern Texts (2024).