Estelle Gueville

Estelle holds a B.A. in History, a B.A. in Art History and an M.A. in History from Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne. Before joining Yale’s PhD program in Medieval Studies, she worked for several cultural institutions in France and the Gulf.

Her research interests include the qualitative and quantitative study of medieval European manuscripts, as well as questions of authorship, attribution and copy. The Paris Bible Project, her main research project and a collaboration with Dr David J. Wrisley (NYUAD), studies the abbreviations and special letter forms as markers of scribal practices. Other projects include work on medieval European illuminations, either from a conservation and technical perspective (“Understanding Medieval Manuscripts Gilding Techniques”) or in relation to the text, using feature & object detection, analysis of colours or intensity to try to find patterns in corpora of similar manuscripts (“Deep Illumination”).

In her thesis, she aims to recover the history of European female scribes during the later Middle Ages by looking at their production. Using pre-existing work, particularly the influential one of Alison Beach about female scribes in Germany, she works with convents and female monasteries’ collections in Germany, France, England and Italy to identify new manuscripts that can be attributed to women and explore to what extent women produced books and collaborated with men to write and illuminate manuscripts in medieval Europe.

Department: Medieval Studies