Trending Science: Skeleton’s blue teeth shed new light on role of women and art in medieval times

According to research published in ‘Science Advances’ the skeleton was discovered buried near a women’s monastery in western Germany with a blue pigment staining her lower jaw. The pigment was made from lapis lazuli stones found in Afghanistan. The stones were highly prized and considered as valuable as gold then. The 45- to 60-year-old was most likely a nun who died between 997 and 1162.

“It’s kind of a bombshell for my field — it’s so rare to find material evidence of women’s artistic and literary work in the Middle Ages” co-author Alison Beach a professor of medieval history at Ohio State University in the United States told the ‘Associated Press’. “Because things are much better documented for men it’s encouraged people to imagine a male world. This helps us correct that bias. This tooth opens a window on what activities women also were engaged in.” Professor Beach continued: “If she was using lapis lazuli she was probably very very good. … She must have been artistically skilled and experienced.”

Move over monks: women’s role in medieval publishing

During the Middle Ages, the pigment was used to illustrate luxury books and religious texts believed to be produced by monks, not nuns. The paper explains that before the 12th century, less than 1 % of books were credited to women. This woman was probably both an artist and scribe of manuscripts.

The finding came as a complete surprise. The scientists initially set out to study medieval health and diets by examining the bones of corpses at the monastery. They were analysing dental calculus when they came across a set of teeth that revealed more than just what had been eaten. “Dental calculus is really cool it is the only part of your body that fossilises while you are still alive” senior author Dr Christina Warinner from Germany’s Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History told the ‘BBC’. “During this process it incorporates all sorts of debris from your life so bits of food become trapped it ends up being a bit of a time capsule of your life.” She added: “We found starch granules and pollen but what we also saw was this bright bright blue - and not just one or two little flecks of mineral but hundreds of them. We had never seen that before.”

“Based on the distribution of the pigment in her mouth, we concluded that the most likely scenario was that she was herself painting with the pigment and licking the end of the brush while painting,” said co-first author Monica Tromp, also from the Max Planck Institute.

“She lived at Dalheim, you can still see the ruins of the women’s community, but there is no art, no books, just a fragment of a comb, there’s only a handful of references in texts,” explained Dr Warinner. “It was written out of history, but now we’ve discovered another place that women were engaged in artistic production that we had no idea about.”

“I think this would be an incredible opportunity to give identity back to these people, we have lost all individuality from them.”

Will artistic and literary legacies that remain hidden in medieval cemeteries rewrite women’s history one day?