Women too seldom make it into the annals of art history – or history in general, especially before the 20th century. But one area in which we can track women who made a mark on their society is in the pages of medieval manuscripts. Here women emerge as authors, powerful patrons and makers of the book and its arts. For only in the trades related to the book could women, in the medieval guild system, trade independently as scribes, illuminators, binders and entrepreneurial stationers.

Medieval queens and abbesses commissioned intricately illuminated books and published their own texts, from poetry to political and scientific treatises. The Anglo-Saxon queen Emma gave stunningly beautiful manuscripts as gifts in her power-play and published her own account of events for which she was imprisoned. Abbess Hildegard of Bingen had her works on music and medicine copied in her scriptorium. Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine and the poetess Marie de France patronised the troubadours and gave birth to courtly love. The adventuress and mystic Margery Kempe dictated her travellers tales. The young widow, Christine de Pisan, set up her own desktop publishing enterprise to earn a living and in the process took on the Parisian university authorities and her male peers. Female artists painted cutting satire in the margins of manuscripts, whilst others were its subjects.

Let Michelle introduce you to some of these remarkable women and to the beautiful and exciting world of their thoughts and arts.

About the Lecturer

Michelle Brown holds a BA in History and History of Art, Westfield College, and a PhD in History, UCL. Professor Emerita of Medieval Manuscript Studies, SAS, University of London, Visiting Professor at UCL and Senior Researcher at the University of Oslo. Formerly a Course Tutor in History of the Book (SAS), Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library, and lecturer at Birkbeck and Morley Colleges. Recent publications include Art of the Islands: Celtic, Pictish and Anglo-Saxon Visual Culture (2016), Bede and the Theory of Everything (2023), Illumino:a History of Medieval Britain in 12 Illuminated Manuscripts (2025). Michelle is happy to provide study days on any of her subject areas, especially making medieval illuminated manuscripts and also art of the islands