[HN Gopher] Save the Scribe: the women who worked with medieval ... ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-10-15 23:00 UTC)