Literacy in Neapolitan Women’s Convents: An Example of Female Handwriting in a Late Fifteenth-Century Accounts Ledger

Little research is currently available on the literacy and writing skills of Neapolitan sisters in medieval convents, due to the lack of adequate historical study of such nuns and the extremely complex nature of the documentary sources. Surviving evidence is scattered far and wide, and the old convent archives have been dispersed. Given the state of the survivals, Antonella Ambrosio seeks a viable way of carrying out research on this topic: the palaeographic analysis of the few available sources using a multidisciplinary approach that combines diplomatics, archival, and historical research. This approach ensures the appropriate contextualization of the source both historically and culturally. In ‘Literacy in Neapolitan Women’s Convents: An Example of Female Handwriting in a Late Fifteenth-Century Accounts Ledger’, Ambrosio provides a case study, analysing a single piece of handwriting evidence. The source is an accounts ledger from the Dominican convent of Santi Pietro e Sebastiano compiled in the second half of the fifteenth century, from 1485 to 1496. Using an analytical approach, the author has identified the handwriting of a particular (anonymous) nun from the convent; Ambrosio studies the script the nun used and formulates hypotheses about her cultural background and how she learned to write. The palaeographic analysis is fully contextualized thanks to the reconstruction of the old convent archive, a reconstruction helped by using digital technologies now accessible online at Monasterium.net. As Ambrosio’s work demonstrates, technological advances may aid codicological work but careful palaeographic analysis is necessary to ascertain the participation of female scribes. In this case we witness the scribal development of a nun who began with a basic knowledge of writing and who went on to perform her practical task not well but adequately for the purpose