I wasn't an early adopter of Supernatural . I knew some huge fans—long-distance, half-online, half-IRL friends who shrieked about it regularly on Facebook long before any of us had Facebook. I didn't get into the show until one day when I walked into a certain university bathroom stall and discovered a shrine to fandom. Every surface was scrawled with declarations of love, from the classic Kirk + Spock to a host of Sherlock pairings.

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While I was studying for my master’s degree in art history, a nearby library exhibited their collection of illuminated manuscripts. They invited a prominent scholar of medieval books to write the catalogue, and in this catalogue, he attributes two of the manuscripts to women, specifically nuns. He praises the first manuscript, a fifteenth-century Rule, or monastic handbook, from the convent of St. Catherine in Nuremberg. He waxes poetic on the convent’s renowned scriptorium and describes…