Medieval women's early involvement in manuscript production suggested by lapis lazuli identification in dental calculus
Abstract
During the European Middle Ages, the opening of long-distance Asian trade routes introduced exotic goods, including ultramarine, a brilliant blue pigment produced from lapis lazuli stone mined only in Afghanistan. Rare and as expensive as gold, this pigment transformed the European color palette, but little is known about its early trade or use. Here, we report the discovery of lapis lazuli pigment preserved in the dental calculus of a religious woman in Germany radiocarbon-dated to the 11th or early 12th century. The early use of this pigment by a religious woman challenges widespread assumptions about its limited availability in medieval Europe and the gendered production of illuminated texts.
Citation
Radini , A , Tromp , M , Beach , A , Tong , E , Speller , C , McCormick , M , Dudgeon , J V , Collins , M J , Rühli , F , Kröger , R & Warinner , C 2019 , ' Medieval women's early involvement in manuscript production suggested by lapis lazuli identification in dental calculus ' , Science Advances , vol. 5 , no. 1 , eaau7126 . https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aau7126
Publication
Science Advances
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2375-2548Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2019 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, so long as the resultant use is not for commercial advantage and provided the original work is properly cited.
Description
This work was supported by the Max Planck Society, the Leverhulme Trust (through a Leverhulme prize to C.S.), the Mäxi Foundation Zurich (to F.R.), and the National Science Foundation (BCS-1516633 to C.W.).Collections
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