Summary
Em and Jesse reminisce about libraries they have known, discuss scriptoria and book-making before the printing press, and talk about women who worked in various Medieval professional guilds, how they got there, and what they did with their money.
Annotations and Corrections
Recommended text for this episode: Reassessing the Roles of Women as ‘Makers’ of Medieval Art and Architecture. Edited by Therese Martin. Leiden: Brill, 2012.
1/ Things that are artisanal: bread, cheese, beer, anything made in Brooklyn. . . .
2/ Christmas Book Flood!! Or the Jolabokaflod.
https://jolabokaflod.org/about/founding-story/
https://www.countryliving.com/life/a46204/jolabokaflod-iceland-christmas-reading-tradition/
3/ The relationship between Finnish and Hungarian is actually pretty complicated. The Finno-Uralic language family has nine language groupings in it; the major languages are, in order of number of speakers, Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, and then a bunch of minority languages that are spoken by very small groups (tribes, I guess), like Mari, Udmurt, Mordvin, and so on. These languages have some structural, lexicographical, and phonetic similarities, but how they’re actually related is still a subject of debate, as is the question of how they might be related to other Indo-European (or non-Indo-European languages). There are also linguists who claim that these are all just a bunch of weird languages that got stuck together and they’re not actually related, as well as weird theories that propose Finnish is related to Basque (probably the most famous isolate) or Hungarian is related to Etruscan.
4/ The movie was The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Good movie, but, uh, wow. Some uncomfortable stuff in there, made more awkward because I was watching it in a kind of art house movie theatre with mostly a bunch of Boomers. . . .
5/ DIY Quarto https://www.folger.edu/publishing-shakespeare/diy-quarto
6/ This site has some examples of different handwriting styles.
Palaeography is the study of historic writing, handwriting systems, etc. We’re discussing medieval Palaeography!
For more on cats, scribes, and their fights, see episode 30 (especially notes 12 and 13), and also this blog: https://medievalfragments.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/paws-pee-and-mice-cats-among-medieval-manuscripts/
A palimpsest is text that’s hidden (invisible to the naked eye) under another text that’s been written over it. Modern technology (ultraviolet light/photography) has made palimpsests visible again without damaging the surface text.
7/ Luttrell Psalter (BL MS 42130): Here’s a link to f157r (that’s the front–recto–of page/leaf 157). Click forward to see amazing and delightful scenes from the Luttrell village, or backwards to see animals and Biblical scenes, and fantastic illuminations.
http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=add_ms_42130_f157r
Here is the link to f. 202v (that’s the back of page/leaf 202): “A knight with the Luttrell arms, mounted, armed, and attended by two women identified by their heraldic sur...