I have mentioned Lepidina's birthday party invitation previously. See here and links. You can find a link to the Latin text there as well. It dates to 100 CE, give or take a few years.
The invitation was excavated at Vindolanda, a Roman fort near Hadrian's wall whose excavation has produced a vast corpus of Latin documentary texts dating to the first and early second centuries CE. These are sometimes known as the Dead Sea Scrolls of Britain. I have visited Vindolanda twice and blogged about the site and its discoveries repeately. For all the posts, start here and follow the links.
Now what about the claim in the current article that "[t]his wooden tablet is the earliest known example of Latin writing by a woman." As phrased, it is arguably false. But we can rephrase it more precisely to (as far as I can ascertain) make it true: This wooden tablet is the earliest know autographic documentary text written in Latin by a woman.
In other words, this is the oldest Latin document composed by a woman (Claudia Severa) and written by her own hand.
But there are at least three texts attributed to women in the Classical Latin tradition which are older than Claudia's letter, but we have only copies of them, not the autographs (original manuscripts).
Excerpts survive of a letter reportedly written by Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, to her son Gaius c. 124 BCE. Some doubt that it is genuine. Her Wikipedia article, with translated excerpts, is here. Athina Mitropoulos also has an essay on her at the Antigone forum.
Six Latin poems are attributed to a Sulpicia, daughter of Servius, ("Sulpicia I"), who lived in the first century BCE. Again, there is some dispute about whether they are genuine. But you can read them in translation here.
The erotic satirist Sulpicia, wife of Calenus, ("the other Sulpicia"), flourished in the second half of the first century CE and was known to the Roman poet Martial. Only two lines of her poetry survive, apparently undisputedly genuine. She died by around the time Claudia sent Lepidina that party invitation.
That's all I've been able to find, and I have other things to do today. But it only took me an hour or so of online research this morning to come up with these three.
In sum, it's true that, because it's a documentary autograph, Claudia's note is the earliest undoubted Latin text written by a woman. But I think these earlier (or perhaps contemporary, in the case of Sulpicia II) works attributed to other women deserve mention too.
It's too bad that this story is circulating (the Jerusalem Post has picked it up too - HT Rogue Classicism.) without this easily found context.
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