p. 56 Thomas Raynalde 1545 Womans Booke – had no truck with outdate’how-to’ genre of recipes and do-it-yourself tips) advises that if you wanted to clear your garden of “lise [liced ideas about women’s bodies. In his section on the womb, he says it’s utterly wrong to think that periods are the purding or cleansing of some waste matter a female body can’t process. He challenged the logic found it Elyot’s dictionary definition, resisting the idea that periods are “evacuations” or “purgations” of waste matter, however natural. This is blood, says Raynalde, as “pure and holsum” as any other blood. How could it not be, he argues, because in pregnancy it nurtures that most precious of things, a human life. Menstrual blood replenishes itself every cycle like a “natural source, spryng, fountayne, or wel.”… ever fresh and ready in case a baby is conceived. … won’t even countenance the ‘dreames and playne dotage’, the fantasies and stupidity, of those who claim that period blood is dangerous… he means the widely circulating superstitions that menstruating women could render mirrors cloudy or spotted, or wither flowers or blight fruit in an orchard… One Tudor ‘book of secrets” (a popular ‘how-to’ genre of recipes and do-it-yourself tips) advises that if you wanted to clear your garden of “lise [lilce] and other small beastes” you could simply get a menstruating woman to walk around it and “all the vermine will fall doune deade”.

p. 248-9 “William Gouge’s 1622 conduct book, Of Domesticall Duties, is famous for its neatly nested and very quotable summary of patriarchal order: “A familie is a little Church, and a little common-wealth,” eacg governed by paternal authority which guides, protects and disciplines. Yet in his third edition, Gouge had to row back quite some distance. He said he needed to make a “just apology” to those he’d offended by the first two editions. He didn’t want them to write him off as “an hater of women”, he said…. He had set out the ‘utter-most’… of a husband’s supreme authority and a wide’s duty to obey. Some readers had interpreted these theoretical extremes as representing how things sgould work in everyday life and thought him completely unreasonable and impractical. In the preface to his third edition, Gouge thus tried to introduce some nuance… A husband, though he had total dominance in theory, ought in practice to make his wide ‘a joint governor of the family with himself’.

p. 18 The beginning of vernacular literacy is not necessarily the same as the beginning of a vernacular literary language. Can we be confident that what we consider the earliest written texts in Occitan or Croatian actually are those languages, or are they in a demotic register of what should still be considered Latin or Church Slavonic? That conundrum leads on to the problem familiar to social scientists as the tension between ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ categories: between the categories of the observers, on the one hand, and those of the people under observation on the other… can prompt us to consider other alliances and trajectories than the single-track one of nationally conceived literary history, which takes the existence of a language for granted.”

p. 19 printing “a transformation of the system of literature from one in which the basic unit is the material book to one in which literature is organised around the ideal concept of the authorial work. In a manuscript culture, where a new text of the ‘same’ work is created with each recopying, authors and scribes are co-producers of literature such that it is not obvious why the category of authorship should be restricted to the person who wrote it first.”

“Scandinavia,” Roberta Frank, pp. 12-22

p. 24 “Iceland was settled at some time in the late ninth century by colonists from Norway and the Viking diaspora of the Hebrides, Northern Isles and Ireland, some of whom had already been exposed to Christianity and letters. Throughout the medieval period, the island remained rural and thinly populated, with never more than 50,000 inhabitants. Iceland had no army, king, or town, and remained a more-or-less independent commonwealth until 1262-4. Yet by the end of the 12^th century, members of its clerical aristocracy were studying abroad, reading the same textbooks, law collections, and grammars as the rest of Europe. … There were two episcopal sees (with cathedral schools) and perhaps nine or ten monasteries (Benedictine and Augustinian, along with educational centres run by chieftain families. Latin works were soon translated into the vernacular, replicating a European-style textual culture in Norse and granting the mother tongue the official status that Latin held abroad. Forms of literary analysis began to be applied to vernacular compositions. When around 1220 Snorri Sturlison in his Hattatl (‘list of verse forms’) distinguished between the exuberant fornskald (early poet), and the later, metrically regular hofudskald (‘chief (or main) poet), his sensitivity to historical change suggests exposure to the interpretive frameworks of contemporary Latin grammatical and rhetorical treatises. By 1250, a volcanic island on the far edge of the inhabited world had a spacious stall to itself within the larger European literary theatre.”

p. 25 “Codices, like people, have a tendency to burn, drown and wander off. The anonymous late 12^th-century Historia Morwegiae, possibly the first Latin historical text written in Norway, survives in a 16^th-century Scottish paper manuscript, discovered near Dundee and first published in 1850; a brief excerpt appears in two (late 14^th– and early 15^th-century) Swedish codices.”

p. 27 In 1263, the Norwegian king Hakon Hakonarson, on his way home from battle, took ill in Orkney. According to his saga, composed ca 1265 by Sturla Portarson, Hakon on his sick bed … asked to be read to from Latin books, but soon found them tiring; he then asked for books in the Norse language to be read to him night and day, first saints’ sagas; and when those ran out, tales of kings from Halfan swarti, and afterwards about all the Norwegian kings, one after another, ending with the saga of Sverrir, his grandfather, raised in the Faroes, a former priest and guerrilla fighter, who claimed to be the illegitimate son of a former ruler. Near midnight, after the reading of Sverris saga had finished, Hakon died. His death may have been unexpected, but the presence of continuous prose texts in Latin and in Norse in a 13^th-century cathedral library in Orkney was taken for granted by the writer.”

Irish and Welsh, Barry Lewis,

p. 52 “The task of building a cohort of Latinists forced teachers to consider the facts of the indigenous language, as issues arose such as how to map its case system onto the Latin one or how to convey categories, like the infinitive, which Lirish lacks. If interpretations of Latin text were one gateway, others were religious instructions (eg the Cambrai homily) and the concern of the church for its property rights under the native legal system(cf. the Armagh records… Irish was doubtless for a time a language of the margin. The Armagh pieces conclude with an awkward justification for writing in Irish ‘not because I could not have penned them in the Roman language, but … because of the great number of Irish names. This suggests that the domain of written Irish was not yet clear in the late seventh century, even though quite ambitious texts in the vernacular were already circulating.”

p. 62 2The beginnings of Welsh vernacular language may lie in praise poetry sustained by revised British kingships after the end of Roman rule. But ait it is not conceded that we have textual witnesses to such early material, then our investigation refocuses on a handful of poems from the 9^th century onwards, all isolated and hard to contextualise. Either way, a continuous narrative is impossible – or perhaps we should say inadvisable – before ca 1100.”

English, Laura Ashe

p. 69 origins “The first of these, and precociously early, was ‘Englisc’, now known as ‘Old English’, the language brought to the island by Germanic invaders in the 5^th century and used (alongside Latin) in writings of various kinds as early as the 7^th century. The second, after the hiatus brought about by the Norman Conquest, occurred in the 12^th-century re-emergence of what we now call ‘Early Middle English’, a non-standardised rendering of a fast-changing vernacular, dialectally highly variant, in constant textual contact with Latin and French. … in the French poetry of royal and aristocratic courts and patrons; that francophone literature was the majority of England’s literature – of English literature – for at least two centuries to come. But English was everyone’s first language, from within a generation or two of the Conquest, and all those trained to read and write in Latin and French in England also spent much of their daily lives in English. Inevitability, the majority vernacular would come to play a part in the literary scene, and would have done so even had it not possessed the astonishing literaty precedents set by Old English.”

p. 71 “In the two earliest extant manuscripts of the Ecclesiastical History, perhaps copied from the autograph, the lines of what we now know as ‘Caedmon’s Hymn’ have been added to Bede’s text. So it is that ‘English literature’ as opposed to irretrievable oral poetry, begins, with a documented poem in English which is explicitly understood in context to be one example of a thiriving genre.”

p. 83 “Extensive religious prose works appeared in Early Middle English from the first decades of the 13^th century. The Ancrene Wisse: a Guide for Ancorites, was written at the request of three ‘sisters’ (whether blood relatives or spiritual siblings) who lived in the extreme self-imposed ascetism of the anchorhold. The author gives them a prescription for not only the ‘outer rule’ of their daily life but the ‘inner rule’ of the pure heart, in a work of complex and entirely current theology which shows its immersion in contemporary Latin and French works (including the romance), while expressing itself in fluent, lively and memorably English prose.”

Spain, Marina S Browlee

p. 90 “The exclusionary model (that the Middle Ages are different) and the mentality that subtends it is at least as old as the Renaissance – which promoted itself as the new age of classical rebirth. The effect … had long-term distorting effects on medieval studies and their perception in the academy – a situation which is finally being rectified”

p. 91 Enrest Robert Curtius with his “infamous characterization of Spain’s ‘cultural belatedness’. “Curtius assumes a uniform ‘Spanish’ vernacular, but this is an unfounded assumption since Arabic entered the peninsula from 711 CE and Hebrew had existed there since Roman times. Iberia was a linguistic crucible that included Latin, Occitan, Catalan, Aragonese, Galician-Portuguese, Arabic and Hebrew – as well as Castilian.”

French, David F Hult

P.112 “French “earliest surviving written text” “That honour (and a literary one at that) goes to the Sequence of Saint Eulalia… of slight length (29 verses) it is also distinctive in its being apparently complete in its narrative of the saint’s martyrdom, ending with a brief prayer to God.”

Greek Panagotis A Agapitos

p. 259 “The hundred years covering the reign of the Komnenian dynasty (1081-1185) represents an important period in Byzantine textual production, with a quantitative rise in public oratory and poetry, the reappearance of fictional texts; the rise in the study of Ancient Greek literature and philosophy, with the production of very different forms of historiographical writings, and experimentation with new and complex performative genres. At a rough guess, about twio-thirds of this textual production is related to the imperial family or to the high officials of state and church.”

Afterword

p. 309 “The Igor Tales features the only personalised female lyric voice of early Rus literature, as Igor’s wife, Iaronslavna, ‘sings her lament on the battlements, addressing the wind, the river Dieper, and the sun”. The poem evokes a semi-sacralised, animistic landscale, alive to the touch and dense with ancient allusiveness; it also maps on to the territory of Kursk, site in 1943 of the greatest and bloodiest tank battle in the history of warfare.”

p. 8 The resistance to certain feminine nouns (a resistance that was only officially overcome in 2019 when the Academie francaise gave approval to the use of feminine terms for most metiers and functions) is to be placed in the linguistic context of the 17th-century – a period credited not only with being a transitional moment because of the standardisation and codification of the French language, but also with ushering in the masculinisation of French, evident from the shift towards the preferred use of the universal masculine pronoun and agreement. As Eliane Viennot and others remind us, grammar is never a neutral or objective phenomenon, and there were exclusionary strategies at play in its development… the term ‘autrice’. This is a term Marie de Gournay used liberally in her oeuvre, both as a scholar of Latin (it has its roots in the Latin feminine noun auctrix, meaning a female creator or originator)… and as a (proto-)feminist intellectual, trying to find a name, and thus a place, for herself.”

p. 10 author’s approach “resists the tug of collectivity that can sometimes shape scholarship on ‘women’s writing’, including the work of historians in the 1990s. Instead, I … wary of the category of ‘woman writer’, either because this appears, if left unpacked, to have essentialising connotations, and/or because it assumes a common orientation towards feminised genres or women’s causes… sees gender as one category alongside others, such as class, education and faith; and allows s to avoid essentialising notions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’.”

p. 14 “significant work by Jane Stevenson and Laurie Churchill has focused on women Latinist; and the important and chronologically wide-ranging Women Classical Scholars, which examines women’s classical reception from the Renaissance to the 20th century, defines a female classicist as a ‘philologist’, foregrounding linguistic knowledge. This would (and does) include Anne Dacier, but exclude Madeleine de Scudery. … early modern genres have been a site of implicit or explicit judgement according to their degree of learning, with traditional forms of reception (translation, imitation, commentary) in the hands of ‘savantes’, valued more highly than new genres that took the ancient world as their subjects (historical novels or romances, imagined lives, incidental verse, epistolary novels) and were products of a female-orientated salon culture, by so-called salonnieres.

p. 15 “Particularly important is the tension between the professionalisation of the writer, and the related necessity to earn a living by one’s pen, and what Viala calls “le tropisme nobilitaire”, that is the aristocratic vaunting of amateurism over money-making. Most of the authors in my corpus shared the need to navigate this tension because of financial difficulties… Scudery, as[piring to aristocracy, and dependent on favours and patronage, played down the professionalism of her literary activity and the labour of her learning (and thus her Latinity) even though she did also (and did need to) profit from it financially. Cournay, on the other hand, needed to prove her worth, though her knowledge of classical culture, in order to court her own patrons, whereas Villedieu, with her publisher, Claude Barbin, developed her own lucrative and influential conception of ancient historical fiction that was geared to public and commercial success.”
p. 16 “Underlying some of these different positions was the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, and its debates about ideologies of learning, classical reception, especially vulgarisation and adaptation and literary value. … Classical languages and culture, particularly Latin, were (still) the epitome of what constituted learning within the literary field in 17th-century France, and whereas men had the cultural privilege to deny the importance of Latinity and Greco-Roman culture (the Modernist position), the path to legitimacy for women was more complicated.”
p. 244 “We witness across this corpus some clear examples of solidarity between women intellectuals and writers. … whereby French literature is linked to a feminine troubadour history, the cours d’amour, and to a line of significant women from Lizan to Scudery, whose alter-ego Damophile is a figure of ridicule. Funning through the work analysed are anxieties about the social space of the salon (we see this in Gournay’s reprimands of contemporary readers, in Scudery’s Sapho, hounded by persistent hangers-on, in Antoinette Deshouliere’s representation of flatterers who are a nuisance), even as we also encounter a celebration of these spaces, whether fictional or historical, physical, or, in the case of Mare-Jeanne L’Hertier’ periodical, virtual. “

p. 245 “For the immediate successor of the figure of the “femme savante” we need to look to mid-18th century England at the ‘Bluestocking Circle ‘ of Elizabeth Montagu…p. 246 “also fed back into French culture in the late 18th and into the 19th century by way of its calque “Les Bas=Blues,”… connotes all that was pejorative about the 17th-century femme savante, particularly unwomanliness”… That connotation of manliness is evident in the well=known series of 40 plates “Les Bas-Blues” by Honore Daumier printed in August 1844 in Le Charivari magazine, in which women are ridiculed for neglecting their wifely or motherly duties while studying or are presented as haggard or unattractive in their pursuit of knowledge”.
p. 249 Next in line of negative or contested figures for the female intellectual might be the late 19th-century/early 20th century phenomenon of the ‘Girton Girl’… literally to women who studied at Girton College in Cambridge, the first college for women founded by Emily Davies in 1869, but the term came to stand more broadly for a certain type of female intellectual… could have positive or negative force, but its charged meaning derived essentially from a distrust of learned women.”