ABSTRACT
This study focuses on women and scribes who wrote together during the high and late Middle Ages. Before analyzing their writing, it is important to contextualize it: that is, to consider what traditions the writers were working in or against, and how those traditions may have shaped the writers’ perceptions of their own projects. By identifying precedents for collaboration between religious women and scribes, I will show how later partnerships-such as those between Hildegard and Volmar, or Birgitta and Prior Peter-were in some respects quite conventional, and were in other respects extraordinary. Although the later partnerships were grounded in Biblical and patristic traditions, they permitted innovations that resulted in increased agency and authority for women writers.
