When love letters were sent; scribes and carriers; distinctive characteristics of the female voice

Lucas L. Schulte analyzes “The Book of Isaiah in the Persian Period.” This was a crucial time in the book’s overall development. He shows how Persian emperors were able to enlist scribal elites in various subject nations and win their support. The well-known Cyrus Cylinder from Babylon may be the most prominent example, but Isa 40–66 also reflects its own interpretation of this international Persian Royal Propaganda Model. This chapter also shows how the later parts of the book of Isaiah interacted with religious and sociopolitical issues in the postexilic Persian province, comparing and contrasting it with the viewpoints of Ezra and Nehemiah in particular.

Ezra–Nehemiah presents multiple theological themes in accord with the complex experiences of repatriation. This chapter is divided under several subheadings, such as trauma, power, identity, hope, prayer, and others, as accessible topical introductions to the theological contributions of Ezra–Nehemiah.

This chapter considers the physical production of writing in a pre-print world, from the clay tablets of Mesopotamia through the papyrus scrolls of antiquity to the birth of the parchment codex in the early Christian period. There follows a discussion of the speed and number of scribes in the world of the medieval parchment book.

Probing further into the diachronic development of the intensifiers and their usage across the intensifier categories, time and the speaker groups, this chapter discusses possible factors that might account for the trends of development attested, among them various collocational features, the possible role played by the foreign origin of the terms, the potential interference on the part of the scribes taking down the notes, and stylistic shifts shaping the records for publication. The chapter also presents and explains a few interaction effects of time on the sociopragmatic variables (role, gender, and class) detected with the help of a supplementary regression model.

Chapter 6 reconstructs the process of petitioning to the king, once a dispute had set in and the decision to litigate before the highest authorities had been taken. Firstly, the chapter establishes the extent of knowledge and understanding about royal justice among Tudor subjects. Returning to some of the themes set out in Chapter 1, it explores the wider culture of complaint with which all prospective supplicants were familiar, provides evidence for growing awareness of the format required for petitions to the king, and surveys the range of professional legal advice available to produce these documents. The contents of the petitions that litigants and their counsel put together is further explored, with some consideration of the potential for the plaintiff’s ‘voice’ to break through the formula. Finally, the chapter sets out the practical steps required to reach the royal household and to seek out the king himself. Throughout this analysis, bills of costs submitted by Requests’ litigants facilitate further scrutiny of its accessibility, and particularly whether its shift from itinerancy to settlement at Westminster negatively affected its poorest suitors.

This chapter reviews what we know about scribal practices of orthography (focusing on spelling), how their orthographies have been studied and interpreted, and where avenues of future research lie. It covers fundamental aspects of studying scribes, showing the multidisciplinary interest in scribes and providing a broad background for thinking about scribal variation in orthography. It discusses issues such as the term and concept of a scribe, the contexts in which scribes worked, and how the role of the scribe has changed over time. The chapter focuses on research concerning scribal orthographies within three broad contexts: studies focusing on phonology and phonetics but using scribal orthography as the source of information; research that concentrates on the intersection of phonology/phonetics and orthography; and studies that are interested in orthography as an exclusively or primarily written phenomenon. It also addresses the issue of orthographic standardization specifically, as scribes have been seen as central in this process, and touches on the various frameworks and approaches adopted for the study and interpretation of spelling regularization and standardization. Finally, the chapter points to some of the avenues open for new discoveries in the future.

Anthony Baleߣs essay takes up recent scholarship on the historicity and production of The Book of Margery Kempe and on international influences on Kempeߣs piety and devotional practices. He argues that while the Book itself presents Kempe as an outsider, repeatedly repudiated by communities, and as disruptive, a ߢqueerߣ influence, collaboration is central to it. The essay recovers three earthly communities with which Kempe and her Book successfully engaged: Franciscan, Bridgettine, and monastic, considering questions of literacy, education, and cultural prestige. Kempeߣs experience in the Holy Land, Bale shows, was indebted to her integration into the Franciscan-led pilgrimage community, where she ultimately gained a high and holy reputation. The essay demonstrates that Bridgettine communities and patronage networks in Rome and at Syon also shaped Kempeߣs spiritual experience, while in Norfolk, a textual community including preachers and confessors formed around her. Following Kempeߣs death, manuscript annotation and printing history suggest a community of engaged readers who responded affectively to her spirituality.

This study of medieval nuns and abbesses as scribes focuses on manuscript evidence from post-Conquest England, especially in relation to changing institutional ownership. Looking initially at an early-twelfth-century legal manuscript from St Paulߣs London (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 383), the essay draws our attention to short texts that were subsequently added to it by one ߢMatildaߣ for the benefit of a female audience. Similar additions are made to another manuscript (London, British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian D. xiv) which contains homilies and saintsߣ lives, this time by an ߢancillaߣ or nun, who inserted prayers that she had authored herself sometime in the late twelfth century. These findings are important because there is very little proof of womenߣs scribal activity in medieval England: hitherto scholars have assumed that manuscripts are written and glossed by men.

The introduction explores womenߣs authorship and addresses the range of works by or attributed to women that were in circulation in England in the Middle Ages in the context of their contributions to a multilingual and inclusive literary culture. It examines the importance of collaboration, arguing that womenߣs writings may be collaborative in different ways: through amanuenses, through translation and adaptation, and through their historical and literary relationships with the men who write their lives. It explores other collaborative aspects of womenߣs literary culture, including womenߣs contributions as patrons, scribes, readers, and subjects of texts. It considers the importance of womenߣs religious communities, as well as the ways in which devotional books were owned by women and exchanged between nuns and by lay women, and it considers the active engagement of women with secular writing as owners and commissioners of books as well as writers. It argues that English womenߣs networks extend from Britain to the Continent and beyond.

The St Michael Collection (dating from 823 to 914) from the Fayum Oasis is the earliest extant group of painted Coptic manuscripts and is impressive because it has remained together as a cohesive whole. The manuscripts reveal aspects of monastic book production ranging from acquisition of materials to the practices of scribes and painters, as well as aspects of book culture, from the dedication of books to sharing them across a regional network of monasteries. The study of this unique collection allows the cost of these manuscripts to be estimated, using inferences about the materials, time, and effort required to produce them. The results of this analysis enhance our understanding of the relationships among patrons, books, monasteries, and scribes in the ninth and tenth centuries in the Fayum Oasis. Ultimately, this chapter argues that, within the context of the Egyptian monastic economy, the production of these books was not expensive. Yet, the cost of books in the medieval period was still perceived to be high.

This chapter surveys cuneiform texts that reflect various degrees of linguistic awareness, providing the reader with a general perspective on Babylonian semiotics and linguistics. The chapter begins with a discussion of the scholarly settings in which cuneiform developed and goes on to explore how this writing system, together with practices of divination and magic, influenced the linguistic consciousness of scribes. It examines a variety of texts, including the basic elementary school exercise SA A, which Assyro-Babylonian scholars often interpreted as an esoteric text describing the very first human words. It also investigates the conceptions of language in epic narratives such Adapa and the South Wind and Gilgamesh.

This chapter works through the evidence that connects Paris 2123 and the Flavigny formulas to a real historical world; that is, the evidence that the scribes who copied the formulas understood the texts that they were copying and thought that they were important and relevant. It first takes up the evidence that connects Paris 2123 to Flavigny, and works through the manuscript’s entire contents to establish the context for the Flavigny formulas themselves. It then shows how scribes behind the Flavigny collection deliberately selected their formulas; that is, chose which to copy, which to discard, and how to arrange them, and how they merged and blended preexisting material to create the formulas that they wanted. It also demonstrates the care the scribes took in copying the formulas; that is, in organizing them and making them easy to refer to, correcting mistakes, clarifying obscure language, and so on. From this material the chapter works outwards to similar evidence in other formula manuscripts, in order to further demonstrate that the formulas are not disembodied texts, but in fact have a historical context that lets us anchor them in a real world and use them as sources to learn something about that world.

In ‘Wisdom at Qumran’, David Skelton takes stock of the Dead Sea Scrolls and shows that they, in some ways, differ from the wisdom literature of the OT. The Scrolls lack those references to Solomon that seem so characteristic to biblical wisdom, and whilst they exhibit Wisdom as a personification, she is ‘toned down’ and appears more passive than she does in, say, Proverbs 1–9. Amplified in tone are the torah-wisdom connection and apocalyptic nature of the Qumran materials, not least the well-known raz nihyeh. Skelton also discusses the importance of poverty and hymnody in the Scrolls, to conclude by drawing these many distinctives together, as well as the Hellenistic context, pedagogy, and scribal practices, in order to reconsider the notion of ‘wisdom literature’ and the scholarly consensus surrounding it.

Paul-Alain Beaulieu examines Mesopotamian Wisdom. While acknowledging that there is no native category of ‘Wisdom Literature’ in Mesopotamia, Beaulieu nonetheless finds it a helpful classification. Within this category are texts of several genres: we find disputations, which begin with a mythological introduction, progress to a verbal contest between non-human combatants, and conclude with the victor pronounced by a god. There are proverbs, found in collections and quoted in letters, as well as fables, often about animals. Instructions and admonitions transmit antediluvian wisdom to postdiluvian generations. Some texts reflect on the problem of theodicy, ruminating on the human-divine relationship and individual divine retribution, while others lament the futility of life and advocate a carpe diem attitude. School debates centralise learning and the scribal arts. These texts are linked by intertextual references and shared features, such as their frequent ascription to individual wise figures, assumption of the absolute and inscrutable power of the gods, and reflection on the human predicament.

Mark Sneed introduces readers to the world of scribes. Drawing first on some of the earliest developments of Sumerian scribalism, he gives an overview of how scribes trained and worked in the ancient Near East more broadly. In Egypt and elsewhere, scribal training began at an early age and involved a wide range of curricula, including wisdom literature, which scribes copied and memorized, as it played a significant role in scribal education. Although concrete evidence for Israelite schools is lacking, Sneed finds reason to believe that similar scribal practices existed there, where wisdom literature too served technical and ethical purposes. Scribes, then, existed in ancient Israel, and for Sneed could be identified in various ways: priests, prophets, and sages. Behind each of these lies the “scribe” as one who composed the texts themselves. Thus Sneed finds far more that is common than different among the biblical materials, wisdom texts included, and conceives of the scribe as holding a wide-ranging professional role in Israel that was not tied down to a single genre of literature.

This introduction provides an overview of the collection of thirteen chapters on the life and works of Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179). The editor compares the content and style of this volume with two earlier multiauthored collections of essays on Hildegard of Bingen (Voice of the Living Light and Brill’s A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen) and enumerates the range of publications, both in print and online, which necessitates an updated study. The volume is organized into three main sections: Hildegard’s life and monastic context, considering the education of women religious in medieval Germany; her writings and reputation, focusing on her visionary and theological output (Scivias, Liber vitae meritorum, and Liber divinorum operum), her extensive correspondence, her sermonizing, her scientific and medical texts, and the reception of her works in subsequent centuries; and finally her music, manuscripts, illuminations and scribes, engaging with the materiality of the transmission of Hildegard’s output. The author closes by discussing potential new areas of Hildegard research, brought to light in various chapters throughout the volume.