Estelle Guéville

My dissertation reconstructs the social and material worlds of women who copied manuscripts before 1600. Combining palaeography, codicology, and computational methods, it recovers the hidden labor of female scribes and analyzes how they shaped medieval textual culture. The project introduces Unknown Hands, an open digital infrastructure that models “Scribal Units”, a new descriptive layer capturing scribal contributions, and integrates metadata, IIIF images, and automatically produced transcriptions to enable inclusive, data-driven research on women’s scribal activity. This innovative project will model how the humanities can combine archival depth with digital innovation to recover and reimagine the contributions of women to the written record.