[HN Gopher] Save the Scribe: the women who worked with medieval ...
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       Save the Scribe: the women who worked with medieval manuscripts
        
       Author : drdee
       Score  : 13 points
       Date   : 2021-10-14 19:58 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.laphamsquarterly.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.laphamsquarterly.org)
        
       | ggm wrote:
       | Adult literacy in general across deep time fascinates me. It has
       | all kinds of implications for leasure vs work life balance, the
       | nature of society, social status. We've allowed an image of life
       | to perpetuate which implicitly alienates 50% of the world's
       | productive labour to a secondary role except for a 9-18 month
       | window of child birth and breastfeeding, ignoring all the other
       | lifetime when economically (I know this is dehumanising) this
       | makes absolutely no sense.
       | 
       | Hunter-gatherers notoriously actually live off women's gathering
       | labour, the hunt part is supplementary protein, and entertainment
       | for idle jackasses: women do most of the work. Why do we allow
       | reading of history to tell us scribes, and implicitly literate
       | people were "mostly men" when evidence is at best one sided?
       | Collectively, religious women may well have outnumbered monks.
       | Men had to do other things, including dying in pointless activity
       | far more than women. Marian reverence implies a religious status
       | of women which demands economic relevance as well.
        
       | wizard-beta wrote:
       | Relevant, from deep in the footnotes of a 1820 edition of Nennius
       | I found in a used bookstore
       | 
       | >Not only men, but women were thus occupied, to whose
       | insufficiency the defects of many manuscripts are assignable. (P.
       | Sarti de Profess. Bonon.) This authority refers to the female
       | scribes of Bologna. We may, however, believe the practice to have
       | been general; for Engelhardus (anno 1200) reports an accident
       | which happened to a nun in the exercise of her employment: "Cum
       | soror una _cui usus erat scribendi membranam_ , dum ad lineas
       | punctaret subulam incaute trahens, oculum transfigit." Defective
       | transcript is, however, not solely to be attributed to females;
       | for the accurate and elegant Petrarch indignantly exclaims, "Who
       | shall prescribe an effectual remedy for the ignorance and
       | worthlessness of copiers, who spoil and confuse the performances
       | they undertake?---At this time, every one who can _redden
       | letters_ or guide a pen, though void of learning, skill, or
       | ability, assumes the character of a scribe. I should not censure
       | their _defects in orthography (for that is a long forgotten
       | art,)_ if they would faithfully transcribe what is before them.
       | They might betray their insufficiency, but we should have in the
       | copy the substance of the original. They now confound both
       | together, and, by substituting one thing for another, we can
       | scarce identify the author from which they transcribed. If
       | Cicero, Livy, and many other illustrious writers, could return to
       | life, and re-peruse their own compositions, _would they
       | understand them, and doubting the whole, would they believe them
       | to be their own, or rather, those of some barbarous people?_ "
        
       | fijiaarone wrote:
       | There was apparently a letter written by a nun, so it only stands
       | to reason that women were medieval scribes writing manuscripts.
        
         | jterrys wrote:
         | Well, there was at least one.
         | 
         | The article is an excerpt from the book, written by the author
         | of the article.
        
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       (page generated 2021-10-15 23:00 UTC)