Until now we have believed that those in charge of copying books during the Middle Ages and before the printing press was opened were men, specifically monks of monasteries.

But a group of researchers from the University of Bergen, Norway, concludes that women also worked as copiers, because some of the books even have the name of the copier written down. A total of 23,774 manuscripts have been analyzed, of which 254 manuscripts have been found to be written by women 1.1%.

But many documents do not have a copyist’s signature, in many others the gender of the writer cannot be identified, and researchers believe that there are still many more unidentified and so the percentage would have been higher.