One Thousand and One Conjectures

Greek grammar forces a choice on even the most self-effacing scribe: the anonymous colophon-verse 'pray for the one who wrote this, a sinner' must inflect that sinner as masculine or feminine. The conjecture joins this banal fact of morphology to the anonymity…

Byzantine dedication epigrams name the man who paid for a manuscript with his rank and office; the conjecture is that when the patron is a woman, the verse overwhelmingly anchors her instead to a named male relative — wife of X, daughter…

Two well-known facts about Byzantine books: convents earned their keep partly by copying, and liturgical books — the steady replication work every religious community consumed — are the genre least likely to carry a signed colophon, since an institution's own service books…

Byzantine piety offered a marketplace of heavenly intercessors, and manuscript patronage was a way of buying their favor; the conjecture is that women's book money followed female advocates. Concretely: in the Byzantine book epigrams, female patrons should cluster on manuscripts of female…

Byzantine dedication epigrams constantly ask prayers 'for the soul of' a named person, and women died in the same numbers as men; the conjecture is that female names nonetheless make up far less than half of the commemorated — the manuscript was…

The standard picture holds that a few exceptional empresses commissioned books in an otherwise male field; the conjecture sharpens this into a gradient with a shape. Across rank tiers in the Byzantine book epigrams, the gender gap in patronage should be smallest…

Byzantine scribes signed off with a fixed repertoire of humility — 'sinner', 'unworthy', 'forgive my errors' — and the conjecture is that named women scribes used exactly the same repertoire at the same frequencies as men: the colophon voice was a uniform,…