Tuesday Trivia: BIRTHDAYS & CELEBRATIONS! This thread has relaxed standards—we invite everyone to participate!

Birthdays provide the occasion for one of my favorite ancient documents: one of the oldest confirmed surviving instances of writing in Latin in a woman’s own hand, a birthday invitation from Claudia Severa to Sulpicia Lepidina written toward the end of the first century CE. The letter is among the Vindolanda Tablets, recovered from a site in northern Britain that has yielded a number of unusual wooden leaf tablets.

The full text of the letter (Tab. Vindol. II 291) is as follows (translation from Bowman 1998):

Claudia Severa to her Lepidina greetings. On the third day before the Ides of September, sister, for the day of the celebration of my birthday, I give you a warm invitation to make sure that you come to us, to make the day more enjoyable for me by your arrival, if you are present (?). Give my greetings to your Cerialis. My Aelius and my little son send him (?) their greetings. (2nd hand) I shall expect you, sister. Farewell, sister, my dearest soul, as I hope to prosper, and hail. (Back, 1st hand) To Sulpicia Lepidina, (wife) of Cerialis, from Severa.

The lines labeled 2nd hand here are those that Severa wrote herself. The 1st hand is an unknown scribe who wrote the letter and addressed it. Especially in a household that employed a secretary, it is not unusual for women’s letters to be written by someone else and include in her own hand only a post-script and salutation or just the salutation. In some cases, especially where the salutation is in a much shakier and less experienced hand, this may have been due to the sender’s level of literacy or comfort with writing, but this wasn’t necessarily the case. From papyrus letters from Egypt, we know that women who wrote full messages also sent letters in which they dictated the main letter before adding a post-script in their own hand. If possible, having a secretary write a letter out for you was simply a social norm.

In this case, we know that the second hand is Severa’s because the archive contains several different letters from her and so we have other letters to compare it to, but this is unusual, and we can’t always be sure whether letters from women are in their own hands or not. We are lucky in this case to have other exemplars to compare Severa’s letter to, because it can otherwise be difficult to identify instances of women’s writing in the material record. There is, after all, not necessarily anything actually inherently different about the letters themselves, as educated women, especially those who were frequent letter-senders and had well practiced salutations, might be virtually indistinguishable from a scribe’s rushed hand (unfortunately, different hands do not always equal different writers), and we do have examples for which we know a scribe penned the entire letter but the greetings and dates are in a faster writing. Paradoxically enough, it is the less practiced writers who are here more visible - a scribe would be unlikely to slow down for a post-script, but a signature done by the sender themselves might be done more slowly. Highly literate women, then, are actually harder to identify.

Beyond that, scholarship often assumes that a letter of unknown authorship written in a well educated hand is a man’s until or unless evidence is provided to the contrary (and even then sometimes only dubiously). Letters which preserve women’s voices might be penned by spouses, family members, or scribes, and this further muddies the waters.

Severa’s letter isn’t the oldest writing we have in a woman’s hand, but it’s among the earliest we can securely identify. Happy belated birthday to Claudia Severa!

Bagnall, Roger S. and Raffaella Cribiore. Women’s Letters from Ancient Egypt, 300 BC-AD 800. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006.

Bowman, Alan K. Life and Letters from the Roman Frontier. Taylor and Francis, 1998.