Around Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Near East, literacy—along with the number of surviving documents—generally increased in the later medieval period (1000–1500). Thus, the evidence for female scribes in those regions also increased. Colophons, palaeographical analyses, records of payments, guild membership, references to women’s education, and a panoply of other sources show women participating in the whole spectrum of scribal and literary activity. This includes evidence for women taking part in the scribal activities that some religious traditions and rules had tried to limit to men, such as copying parts of the Torah. The extent of female literacy and scribal activities remains obscured, however, by the usual problems of source survival plus a continuing tendency in mainstream historiography and metadata to overlook decades of careful scholarship about female scribes. While male scribes can be assumed, female scribes still have to be proved.