One Thousand and One Conjectures

When a monk or abbess died, a messenger carried a mortuary roll — a parchment scroll — from monastery to monastery, each house adding a dated, located entry with prayers and often verse; some rolls collected hundreds of entries across years. This…

Medieval letters survive because institutions copied them — papal registers, monastic letter-books, cathedral archives — and those institutions accreted around famous men. The conjecture joins that banality of archiving to a hole in the map: women's Latin letters should survive almost exclusively…

The ars dictaminis, the letter-writing curriculum of the high Middle Ages, prescribed salutations calibrated to the exact rank of sender and recipient, and men of standing flouted the manual freely as a privilege of standing. The conjecture is that women's letters comply…

Medieval chanceries wrote in the institutional 'we', and the conjecture is that this small pronoun sorts the surviving women's letters into their true classes: abbesses should use the institutional plural and self-designation by office at rates matching bishops and abbots, while lay…

A letter usually acknowledges the letter it answers, so every corpus carries a shadow-census of the mail it failed to keep. The conjecture applies this familiar estimator to gender: in the medieval Latin letters, references by men to received women's letters that…

Men's medieval letters were anthologized for their style; the conjecture is that women's letters survived instead as paperwork — disproportionately transmitted through cartularies, dossiers, and records of donations and disputes rather than through literary letter-collections. The join is between transmission vector and…

Medieval Christendom's one unimpeachable model of a woman addressing supreme power was the intercessor — Mary before her Son, Esther before the king. The conjecture is that this model governed real mail: women's letters to popes and monarchs should overwhelmingly ask on…

Male religious houses received their exemplars — the master copies from which new books were made — through institutional plumbing: filiation visits, general chapters, confraternity networks, channels that leave no letters. Female houses were barred from most of that circuit, so the…

The dictamen classroom composed exercise letters in invented voices — including women's — and medieval collections transmitted these showpieces alongside real mail. The conjecture is that a detectable stratum of 'women's letters' in the Latin tradition are male school products, and that…