Archaeologists recently unearthed the skeleton of a woman they say was probably a skilled artist who helped produce the richly illustrated religious texts of medieval Europe. The woman lived sometime between 997 and 1162 CE, according to radiocarbon dating of her teeth, at a small women’s monastery called Dalheim in Lichtenau, Germany. And she died with tiny flecks of expensive lapis lazuli pigment still caught in her teeth, probably from licking the tip of her paintbrush to make a finer point.

There’s something in your teeth

During the Middle Ages, the vivid blue pigment called ultramarine was made with powdered, purified lazurite crystals, which come from the rare stone lapis lazuli. Because it’s only mined in northeast Afghanistan, the mineral had to travel thousands of miles by land and sea through far-flung trade networks to reach Europe. It was fabulously expensive, ranking alongside silver and gold, and it would have been used to paint illustrations in only the most lavish, ornate, and expensive illuminated manuscripts. That means that only the most skilled, experienced painters would have access to it. Obviously, this unnamed medieval woman must have been exceptionally good at her work.

She died somewhere between the ages of 45 and 60, and her bones suggest a life of very little physical work or disease, which is exactly what you’d expect from a woman who spent her days painting at an isolated monastery. Anthropologist Christina Warinner of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and her colleagues took samples of her fossilized dental plaque, or calculus, in 2014 to check for microscopic remains of plants, which would offer clues about the medieval woman’s diet. But when they dissolved the sample to extract the plant bits, the process also released hundreds of tiny blue particles.

“It came as a complete surprise,” Aniti Radini of the University of York, co-first author on the study, said in a statement to the press. She and her colleagues used spectroscopy to analyze the chemical composition of the mysterious blue flecks. It wasn’t hard to find a match; most blue pigments used during the Middle Ages contain metal—usually cobalt, copper, or iron. Only lazurite doesn’t; it’s rich in sulfur, instead.

Warinner et al. 2019

Warinner et al. 2019



Warinner et al. 2019

Warinner et al. 2019

Warinner et al. 2019

The blue flecks of lazurite came with microscopic bits of a clear mineral called phlogopite, another ingredient in lapis lazuli. It’s rich in iron and magnesium, and it’s possible to trace the ratio of those two elements to specific mining spots in northeast Afghanistan. Using this, Warinner and her colleagues could eventually be able to tell exactly where Dalheim’s scribes and painters got their pigment.

The team found lazurite particles embedded in the calculus on several of the unnamed woman’s teeth, which suggests that licking the tip of her brush was a habit she practiced over a long period of time. It’s another reminder that your dental plaque will probably give future archaeologists a truly unnerving amount of information about your personal life, but it also means that this woman probably spent a long career painting illustrations into ornate manuscripts, working with the most valuable tools of the trade available at the time.

Putting herself back in the narrative

And that offers a glimpse into the mostly hidden work of “the modest and pious women who quietly produced the books of medieval Europe,” as Warinner and her colleagues write. Recent historical research suggests that for much of the Middle Ages, nuns were prolific producers of religious books, especially in Germany and Austria, where records as early as the 700s CE mention books transcribed and illuminated by women. In Germany, about 4,000 books produced between 1200 and 1500 CE can be attributed to 400 specific female scribes.

For the early Medieval period, when the unnamed illuminator of Dalheim lived and worked, it’s a different story. Fewer records—and fewer books—survive from those early days. And even at surviving libraries of women’s monasteries before 1100 CE, only about one percent of the books can be clearly connected with female scribes and painters.

But the woman from Dalheim tells us, through the telltale blue flecks in her mouth, that women were scribing and painting manuscripts in medieval Europe, even if history had forgotten them. Until the 1400s CE, most scribes and painters didn’t sign their work, as a mark of humility, and that has largely erased women from the record, leaving historians to assume all the scribes were men.

“The case of Dalheim raises questions as to how many other early women’s communities in Germany, including communities engaged in book production, have been similarly erased from history,” wrote Warinner and her colleagues. Warinner added in a statement to the press, “This woman’s story could have remained [hidden] forever without these techniques. It makes me wonder how many other artists we might find in medieval cemeteries—if we only look.”

Though archaeologists now know her story, the medieval illustrator’s name remains lost. A couple of centuries after her death, Dalheim burned to the ground, leaving behind no records, no books, and no markers on the graves in the small cemetery beside the church. As early 20th-century author Virginia Woolf once wrote, “For most of history, anonymous was a woman.”

Science Advances, 2018. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aau7126 ;(About DOIs).

Listing image by Warinner et al. 2019