Medieval manuscript makers | History Extra
""‘How uncommon is Margery Kempe?’
‘Well, I suppose it, it depends how you want to measure common or uncommon, right? If you take the fact that she's a female writer, that is surprisingly common, I think, is one of the great misconceptions that there were very few female writers from the Middle Ages. In fact, in the book, I talk about women, and women's role in the production of manuscripts, as scribes, as authors, as patrons, as artists. I talk about them in every chapter, except for one, the chapter that I talked about, disasters where manuscripts were very nearly lost. Because I want to make clear that actually, we have this rather kind of narrow vision of the past, where we, it's in our vision of the past is kind of infused by our own patriarchal prejudices. And actually, the past is often richer and more interesting than we give it credit for. The question of, is, is Margery Kempe common in the sense that she's a woman of a kind of lower social status? And how frequently do we hear from those people? Well, there's another example in the book, these amazing letters from the 15th century called the Paston Letters, which is kind of cache of letters between several generations of one family, who also lived in East Anglia where Margery Kempe was from… the women in the family seemed to have been able to read, but many of them couldn't write. And so they dictated their letters to scribes, who, who had their words and wrote them down. And some of them actually developed relationships with those scribes’...
‘I think scribes felt that they had the license to play with a text in a way that perhaps we wouldn't today,’
‘How much influence did an author have in the production of a manuscript of their work? Obviously, if they're in different centuries, or it's been copied several centuries later, it's not going to obviously really have that direct influence on that. But what about if they were a bit closer in time?’
‘I think a lot of authors showed a keen awareness of how once the text was out of their hands, they really had very little control over it. There's a famous little poem that Chaucer, supposedly by Chaucer, but some scholars disagree with them. In which also addresses a scribe called Adam who copies his work. And, you know, he complains about, and he says, Adam, please really just copy this correctly. And that is true in the 15th century, but also, there's a writer from the early medieval period, called Alfritsche [sp?], a 10th century writer who writes something very similar in his, in his collection of, of saints’ lives. He says, you know, scribes, please make sure you copy this correctly. He knows full well. So I think authors probably were aware of that.
There's a very interesting writer, called Hugerberg [sp?], who was a missionary nun in the eighth century who, who wrote these two saints’ lives. And at the end of one, in the beginning of another one, she wrote this little section in code, which explained what her name was. And in the main text itself, the author announces themselves as little more than a indignous saxonica [sp?], so a lowly Saxon woman. So we know that the author is a woman, but nobody knew what the author's name was, until the 1930s, when a scholar was able to untangle this little code that was sort of stitched into the end of the text. And I, I often think about that, because I sometimes wonder whether she knew the way that her text would be copied and recopied over time, and the process of transmission would mangle it. And perhaps she knew that in the process of transmission, so often, authors’ names were lost, because if an author's name was ever attached to a text in the first place, it probably appeared, you know, in what we might call a rubric, meaning literally written in red. But not necessarily written in red, but essentially a title at the beginning of a text. And that rubric could just fail to be copied, or it might be lost. And so an author's name might be erased, especially if that author's name was female. And so I sometimes wonder whether she was fully aware of how her name might be erased, and, which is why she chose to record it in a little code.
There's another lovely example, which is Marie de France, who wrote an Anglo Norman, which was the language of the kind of educated elite in England after the Norman Conquest. And she embedded her name. She described herself as called Marie, and she said that she was from France. Although she probably actually was from England. But what's interesting is that she embedded her name within the verse of her text. So she used as it were the kind of controlling mechanism of rhyme, which ensured that, that name had to be copied and recopied correctly in order to make the rhyme work, right. And again, I often think about that. I often think, was that a strategic decision? Did she know how her name would most often, most likely be erased from a text over time if it was female?’...
‘Most manuscripts, particularly in the early medieval period, were were made from parchment. And parchment is the prepared skin of a domestic animal, so a sheep or a calf, and it's an unbelievably elaborate process to make parchment. I actually went to William Cowley’s, which is the last parchment maker in the UK and watched this process. And it's, it's an incredible experience. It's very, very smelly. It's also very labor intensive, but it begins with these hides being soaked in quicklime. And then they get thrown over a sink called a stump, and they have their hair removed, and then they get soaked again. And then they get hung up and stretched over a kind of frame that looks like a sort of rustic trampoline, and then they get scraped again, and then they get put in an oven. It's am it takes a long time. And at the end of this, lengthy process, what you get is this, a fantastic writing material, it's it's it's flexible, it's milky smooth, it's, it has lots of advantages as a writing service, because you can rub out, if you write out, if you make a mistake you can rub it out. And what's great about it is it's durable. It's it's so so durable. There are manuscripts like for example, the Codex Sinaiticus, which was made in about around 325 to 375. It's an important partial copy of the New Testament. And that manuscript, given its age is in pretty mint condition. And that's a real testament to the durability of parchment. It's a great irony that cheap 20th century paperbacks with glued spines often present kind of more of a headache for library conservation department than medieval manuscripts, because they just, they just aren't built to last. And modern paper is made from wood pulp. Whereas medieval paper was made from, from rags that were basically boiled down in a kind of big vat and then sort of sieved out and pressed between layers of felt. And so, actually medieval paper is a lot more durable than modern paper.’"
