Heroines of the Middle Ages

The article begins with a sort-of amusing story.
Isn’t it irritating when your ancestral manuscript collection gets in the way of your ping-pong tournament? That was Colonel Butler-Bowden’s predicament in the early 1930s. He was so peeved by the heap of rubbishy papers cluttering up his games cupboard that he declared his intention to burn the lot. Luckily, his ping-pong companion that day happened to be a curator at the V&A, so the colonel was dissuaded from book- burning and his manuscripts were shipped instead to the museum’s London archives.

Among the collection was the unique edition of the Book of Margery Kempe, often described as the first autobiography in English, a sensational account of a woman’s mystical visions, travels and tribulations. For centuries, while her book hibernated in the Butler-Bowden estate, Kempe was completely unknown.

It would have been a great tragedy if that book had been burned. One wonders how many works of great interest have been, over the years, for idle reasons or impassioned ones like Henry VIII's desire to weaken the Catholic Church by destroying its libraries. 

7 comments:

E Hines said...

Or lost just through the ravages of time?

How many Platos, Aristotles, Aeschyluses, Lipit-Ishtars, Hammurabis, other perspectives of Gilgamesh, and on and on have we missed, who might have been every bit as influential had their stuff survived the ages?

Eric Hines

Texan99 said...

My sister sent me a book called "The Gilded Page" for Christmas. It started as an interesting account of the very difficult and expensive process of producing handwritten and handcrafted books, but soon drifted into the well-worn channel of obsessing over books written by or about neglected women. One of the stories, in fact, was the very one you cite, about the piles of papers that were obstructing the search for ping-pong balls or something of the sort, which turned out to contain the Margery Kempe manuscript. It was more than I really needed to know about Kempe's difficult life, and not really as interesting as the information about book production.

I bogged down and set the book aside. Does every single topic really have to be turned into a scolding lesson about how we don't pay enough attention to this or that sliver of society? I very much enjoy a narrative based on the "diamond in the rough" theme, an instructive tale of the wonderful rewards lurking for someone who can open his mind to potential in areas he's been taught to hold in contempt--but please. The point the of a diamond-in-the-rough is that the stone must turn out to be something extraordinary upon being selected, examined, and polished, not just a stone that has been ignored all its life, because it was not much more interesting than all the other stones, and enjoyed less prestige.

On the other hand, it's fascinating to reflect on how few manuscripts survive, and how our ideas about the past are influenced by our complete ignorance of ones we didn't get lucky enough to find. It makes you think of "A Canticle for Leibowitz." Of course it's not completely random; we may have copies of things like Homer of the Epic of Gilgamesh because they were such a hit that they warranted having a lot of copies made, thus increasing our chances of finding one intact. For the future, Harry Potter, I suppose.

Anonymous said...

The review, and Tex's comment, reminds me of a frustration I had with a Cambridge University Press book about women in the early Middle Ages. It is a good book overall, although I was hoping it would have more about women in Eastern and Central Europe (it was weighted toward Anglo-Frankish sources and law). However, the author kept pushing modern sensibilities into the book and arguing that women only had power because of their ancestry or marriage, or both. She didn't even nod to the fact that it was true of men as well, and that while yes, the laws kept women from being mobile*, laws also kept most men tied to one place. I learned a great deal from the book, and it was useful, but it wasn't quite what it could have been, in my opinion.

LittleRed1

*The author equated physical mobility with legal freedom and social rank. The period in question was before pilgrimages to more than local shrines became common.

Grim said...

There really are some interesting Medieval women, including a few mentioned on the sidebar. I take them to merit my interest without feeling obligated to pay attention to them qua women.

I do have a friend though who specializes in what she considers under appreciated women in the history of philosophy. Only some of them are really interesting, though often they’re important. One was greatly responsible for Kant’s popularity in the English speaking world. She popularized his ideas, in other words; and while that was an important service and significant to the subsequent history of philosophy, she isn’t herself as interesting.

Texan99 said...

It would be terrific to be able to appreciate people for whatever their qualities are, neither exaggerating nor depreciating them as a result of a preconceived notion about what their station in life suggests they should merit.

I'm not blind to the idea that it might sometimes be a helpful corrective to pay a little extra attention to a demographic that's historically been ignored or short-changed, but my goodness, can that effort curdle fast. Unless it's a technique that helps us open our eyes without undermining our judgment and good sense, it's not much use. It's mere grievance-mongering and playing at games for allocating spoils.

If we could just each do our best with what we've got, and acknowledge what others are doing with what they've got, and quit trying to determine ahead of time what that will be, or deny any divergence from the plan.

Anonymous said...

One of the textbooks I uses chose a professor's widow in Germany as the "women were too in science - and were shut out of the field, see, see!!!" for the Enlightenment. I went out and found three women who really WERE scientists and mathematicians in their own right, and one who assisted her husband and who got his papers and books out of France after his execution, then oversaw publication and translation.

The professor's widow seems to have been a good math teacher, but was denied his position after his death on the grounds that a man would be supporting a family, and so needed the job. Yes, it was not fair by today's standards, but I'd like to have a wider array of examples for my students to see.

LittleRed1

Texan99 said...

It's why I pay little attention to sweeping statements about women's abilities that rest on data from times when they were shut out of competition. On the other hand, it seems fair to compare results from the present, and it shouldn't be taboo.

My wonderful new Nick Lane book deals with biochemistry research about the Krebs cycle and energy metabolism generally, mostly starting in about the 1930s. There were beginning to be talented women in the field by then. Krebs himself was a Jew who prudently escaped Germany in 1933, lucky for the rest of the world. He wouldn't have been allowed to make a meaningful contribution, in all likelihood. It's a dumb approach, whether it's justified by racial purity panic or by the desire to protect men from wage competition from women.