But there were others-scribes, nuns, and religious women-who were using the technology of writing to serve their own communities. They are frequently feted, and all have settings at Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in the Brooklyn Museum. History celebrates a handful of exceptional women from the Middle Ages, like Hrotsvit of Gandersheim (10th century), whose plays are the first of which we know written by a woman in Western literature Hildegard of Bingen (12th century), who innovated with musical composition and Christine de Pizan (14th-15th century), a prolific late medieval author. Yet, women had a very real place in developing, maintaining, and innovating this arduously crafted technology, using it to share visions, communicate with each other, and create works of staggering beauty and insight. Whether it be Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, Game of Thrones’ Citadel, or the board game Biblios, the image that “scriptorium” conjures up is that of robed men laboring over texts. Today, most popular representations of manuscript production and scriptoria depict exclusively male spaces. Ink underwent a similarly technical process, as it was often the result of a multi-day process of steeping and simmering nuts or barks to arrive at the desired consistency and color. Once the skins were ready, they would be painstakingly scraped to remove the animal’s organic matter the skin would then be stretched and dried until it would be ready for the scriptorium. After selecting skins with as few blemishes as possible, a parchmenter soaked them in a chemical solution, typically a mixture of water, barks, lime, or human waste, to loosen the hair and flesh. Book-making began by slaughtering and skinning animal, usually a cow, calf, or goat. As with some digital technologies today, which now allow us to communicate on a global scale, writing provided a means to store and communicate information, leading to several “renaissances” in the Middle Ages.īook-making and ink-making, as integral components of writing, were, and still are, technical processes. For example, the earliest written script, Cuneiform, invented in Mesopotamia around 5,000 years ago, was primarily used to record inventories of goods, enabling people to trade across long distances. Technologies are like extensions of our bodies: cars extend our ability to move, phones extend the range of our voices, a pair of glasses enhances our vision, and writing enhances our memories and extends the distance we can communicate. Writing has been a part of societies for so long that it may seem odd to think of it as an innovative technology, but it has been a central force in shaping human history. Their highly specialized labor, complete with its own education, tools, and practices, was only part of a centuries-long process of experimentation and refinement. At the center of this project were scribes, many of whom were, perhaps surprisingly, women. Since this was an era before the printing press, writing was an essential technology that allowed information to be communicated across long distances, most often in the form of books. Far from being places of rote worship, these religious houses sparked an explosion of scientific research that transformed European life. In the early Middle Ages, Western Europe was home to a growing number of monasteries and convents.
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