About TeamNun

Woman...and Master

In 2019, for the very first time, PI Alison Beach and International Co-I Anita Radini were part of an interdisciplinary team that identified a medieval female artist from her skeletal remains using cutting-edge techniques in bioarchaeology, upending common assumptions about the role of women in art. In this extraordinary collaboration, Beach’s expert historical work on book production linked the repeated gestures of a medieval artist to Radini’s bioarchaeological data. The original article in Science Advances has been downloaded thousands of times, and the team’s collaborative work was selected as one of the Top Ten Discoveries of 2019 by Archaeology Magazine. The image of a medieval woman shaping her pigment-suffused paintbrush with her lips has also inspired several novels and even a sonnet, The Artist, by the award-winning poet Erin Redfern. “Let’s ask her,” Redfern proposes. “Are you Woman, or Master?” Given voice through the combined power of the humanities and science, she answers: I was both – woman and master.