Abstract
In 1386, a female scribe named Hannah, the daughter of Menaḥem Ẓion of Cologne, copied a popular thirteenth-century halakhic handbook Sefer miẓwot ḳaṭan by Isaac of Corbeil. One of only a handful of surviving Hebrew manuscripts written by female scribes, Hannah's Sefer miẓwot ḳaṭan contains markings and marginal drawings that add an additional layer of meaning to the structure of the text.
Hannah was a member of an important and well-connected scholarly family. Examining those elements of her manuscript's physical layout that give clues to Hannah's interaction with the text, including interactions inflected by gender difference, will illuminate a unique intersection of scholarly and female piety.
In addition, almost a decade before she produced her manuscript, Hannah was also involved in a traumatising trial of her husband, Simon of Siegburg, during which she may have been forcibly baptized. This paper will examine Hannah's manuscript in the light of her biography and explore how its marginal drawings may express not only her personal attitude to Jewish practice but also her struggle to articulate and preserve her Jewish identity.