The Voynich Ninja

I guess I am not the only one who has seen this:

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Though it would be wonderful were the Voynich manuscript to provide another fragment of womanhood in medieval times, I don't hope for such a thing.

Also, to pick out a tangential point, but:

Quote:...scholars have been mounting a burgeoning effort to highlight the diversity of medieval European life. Historians have emphasized, for example, that the people we call “English” were actually immigrants, ...

The author has it backward. Medieval English historians deliberately stressed the continental origins of English people. Modern science has shown a broad continuity of the population from pre-Roman Britannia to early England

A big chunk of the town names in northeastern England (and Saxony) are Scandinavian.

The Angles were southern Danes (Danish names, Danish kings).

In Ireland, Dublin (which so many think of as the quintessential Irish town) was founded and ruled for the first couple of centuries by Vikings.

In Scotland, a big chunk clans are of Norwegian origin.

The Old English language is full of Norse words and bits of Norse grammar. French dominion changed the character of the language (a huge proportion of English words are French and the courts apparently operated in French for a long time).

Many of the battles between the "English" and the Scandinavians were actually battles between earlier waves of Scandinavians and later ones.

The Celts were on the Iberian peninsula and in Central Germany before they settled in the islands.

There was a Danish colony near Friesland until a couple of hundred years ago and also Scandinavian communes in the alps.

The battle banner of the Longobards (southern Scandinavians) was the Danish flag.


I've always thought of the Picts as being indigenous but there is at least one historic historian who wrote that when the Picts migrated to the northeast, they asked if they could settle there and the "local people" (not named in the account that I read) said, no, you can't live here, but if you ally with us against the so-and-so tribe, then you can live over there.

Absolutely none of the above was taught to us in school.

I also didn't know the Burgundians were Scandinavian (I assumed Frankish or Gallish).


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So I thought what the heck? and looked up a chart of Scandinavian migration when I was trying to figure out the herbal manuscript connections between Naples/Salerno and Lombardy, and discovered Scandinavians had colonized almost every corner of Europe and eastern Russia at one time or another, all the way into northern Africa and Greece, and eventually also in India. Wave after wave of Scandinavians moving south.

I began to wonder why these south-moving waves happened so frequently and decided it must be the long cold winters, all those Scandihoovians snuggling up together, creating vast numbers of babies who then went in search of warmer lands and their own identity.  

Thanks, René. I am familiar with some of this...I sampled the handwriting of as many female scribes as I could locate, to see if they wrote differently from the male scribes, but I hadn't seen this specific article.

What I have NOT been able to find, is the name of a female Jewish doctor who lived in the middle ages that I read about early in my VMS research. If the VMS were designed or created by a woman, she would be a good candidate. She apparently defied convention in the area where she lived where women were discouraged from practicing medicine, but I lost track of where I found the information and haven't been able to re-locate it.


My initial impression of the VMS in 2007 was that it was created by a female, but I changed my mind over the next few months as I became more familiar with it, and realized it could be either male or female. I even looked into the practice of castration at the time, to see if a eunuch had created it (quite a few of the nymphs are sexually ambiguous). I thought perhaps someone who had access to a harem, like a eunuch obstetrician, might have created it. But I discovered that even eunuchs were usually kept away from harems, so probably they used female midwives.

Prior to the 14th century castration was still practiced rather frequently (more than I realized), and the ancients castrated themselves so they could be temple goddesses (who were held in great reverence), but by the 15th century, it appears to have become uncommon.


Speaking of castration, in some moments of history, the men were supposed to do it themselves. They were handed a giant vice-grips style tool and told to go at it while everyone watched. I'm not even going to describe my reaction to reading that.

I'm glad you bring this up ReneZ,
In this field as in many others, women were not only present, their presence was normal. Medieval manuscripts created by women are not a rarity.
There's nothing extraordinary about the fact that there would be medieval women You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (see more here too), or doctors or any other non-physically demanding profession (although there were also women in these too, eg. mining and warfare). They were present in almost all corporations, either alongside men or in their own corporations.

What is incredible to me is that people today should find this surprising, and that the article ReneZ links to should even need to be written.
I guess it stems from the general view of the medieval period  as "dark ages" of oppression, when in reality, the middle ages are a time of considerable social progress, among other things in the promotion and expansion of the role of women in all fields, in stark contrast with   antiquity.
If we are going to look for times when women were really discriminated against and excluded from professional activities, we might want to look instead at antiquity, at the so-called enlightenment and at the 19th Century.

Certainly, misogyny existed in the middle ages, but nowhere more so than in universities, especially after the 13th century. Academics were pretty much the only ones who excluded women from their spaces,  and made the oft-quoted statements that women shouldn't do this or that.  These quotes are often presented as rules about women were allowed to do, when they are just opinions: Paradoxically, their disapproval actually informs us about the fact that women were doing those things!    

JKP: There was not one Jewish woman doctor in the middle ages, but a plethora of them, all over Europe. The idea that this "defied convention" couldn't be further from the truth, (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) and stems from the same stereotypes I am lamenting in this post.
Perhaps you'll find the one you were looking for among the many medieval Jewish female doctors  listed You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..


The negative stereotypes about the middle ages are so prevalent, in my opinion, because this narrative allows us to reinforce other stereotypes (the church as oppressive and "anti-science"; the rural world as "backwards"; technological progress as a bearer of social progress, etc) and to congratulate ourselves over "how far we've come".


I'ill end this rant with a quote from one of my favorite historians of the medieval period, Jacques Le Goff (2000 interview):
"In the West, there have not been more women prime ministers than there were queens and regents governing in the Middle Ages."

Yes, I know there was more than one female Jewish doctor (and other female doctors, apothecaries and midwives), but this one had a profile that "felt" like an especially good candidate for the VMS. Darn it, I did not bookmark the information and have not been able to relocate it.

Part of this social equality came from the low population numbers. People were used to working alongside members of the other sex in almost all aspects of life in the third class (mainly peasant agricultural life). You were forced to work, or starve. And a lack of population, especially after the plagues, meant that any skilled hands would be welcome in most cases.
The trick was to be able to get out of having a family and subsidence lifestyle! 
It wasn't until the establishment of an urban lifestyle, with increased economic prosperity, and the development of a proto middle class  that women suddenly became almost chattel, to be shown off.
The sexist attitude had always been entrenched in Western culture, but it wasn't until people became richer - and able to drop out of the workforce whilst still living well - that sexism in everyday life became entrenched.
I think we can see this process becoming more and more dramatic until we get to the early 20th century, when social mores suddenly imploded.

(13-07-2018, 02:02 PM)VViews Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'ill end this rant with a quote from one of my favorite historians of the medieval period, Jacques Le Goff (2000 interview):
"In the West, there have not been more women prime ministers than there were queens and regents governing in the Middle Ages."

One could add that there have not been more women popes in modern times than during the Middle Ages.