Marie Pavie

Marie Pavie (fl. 1600) was a calligrapher active in France at the beginning of the seventeenth century and one of the earliest women to have published a copybook, Le premier essay de la plume de Marie Pavie, under her own name.

Life & work

Pavie, along with Dutch calligrapher Maria Strick, were part of a vanishingly small group of professional early-modern women calligraphers. Little is known about Pavie's life and there are only two copies of her book extant, and one of those partial: the Newberry Library in Chicago holds the only known complete copy, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris has some leaves. Copybooks tended to receive heavy usage and many have not survived.