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your eye, in a good or
bad way. Email:
charlotte.barker
@texerepublishing.comAccording to a recent discovery by
an international research team, when
it came to producing illuminated
manuscripts, women in the Middle
Ages really got their teeth stuck into
the process.
They analyzed the teeth of a female
skeleton found in Dalheim, Germany, and
discovered a blue pigment in the dental
calculus. Micro-Raman spectroscopy
confirmed it was lapis lazuli, a mineral
used for coloring the manuscripts at
the time, and more recently as a semi-
precious stone in jewelry.
Illuminated manuscript production in
the Middle Ages was previously thought
to be the province of men, specifically
monks (according to an article in The
Atlantic, one expert suggested this
woman had come into contact with the
pigment because she was the “cleaning
lady”). “Microscopic analyses have
revealed that dental calculus (calcified
tooth tartar) can entrap and preservea wide range of microdebris related
to craft activities,” said the authors in
the paper (1). One of the researchers’
theories for this is that women were
involved in the production process, thus
painting a different picture of medieval
gender roles.
What’s more, it gives some insight into
trading at the time – the lapis lazuli stone
was mined only in Afghanistan, 4,
miles away. In this case, it was found in
“an otherwise unremarkable women’s
community in northern Germany,”
which, the authors believe, “powerfully
testifies to the expansion of long-distance
trading circuits during the 11th-century
European commercial revolution.”
This isn’t the first time a tooth has told
the truth; dental plaque has shown that
women from ancient societies were
partial to smoking (2) and has even
helped reconstruct the genome of the
bacterium behind the Great Plague (3).Reference- A Radini et al., “Medieval women’s early
involvement in manuscript production
suggested by lapis lazuli identification in
dental calculus”, Sci Adv, [Epub before print]
(2019). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aau - https://theanalyticalscientist.com/techniques-
tools/the-tooth-will-out - https://theanalyticalscientist.com/fields-
applications/pestilence-persistence
Something Old...
Something Blue
Lapis lazuli found in
dental calculus paints a
different picture of medieval
gender roles(^8) Upfront