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WHAT GENDER IS MOTHERHOOD?
GENDER AND CULTURAL STUDIES IN AFRICA AND THE DIASPORA
Series Editor : Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, Stony Brook University
Series Advisers:
Adeleke Adeeko, Ohio State University
N’Dri Assié-Lumumba, Cornell University
Ayo Coly, Dartmouth College
Carolyn Cooper, University of Western Indies, Mona
Godwin Murunga, University of Nairobi
Filomina Steady, Wellesley College
This book series spotlights the experiences of Africans on the continent and in its multiple and multilayered diasporas. Its objective is to make available publications that focus on people of African descent wherever they are located, targeting innovative research that derives questions, concepts, and theories from historical and contemporary experiences. The broad scope of the series includes gender scholarship as well as studies that engage with culture in all its complexities. From a variety of disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary orientations, these studies engage current debates, address urgent questions, and open up new perspectives in African knowledge production.
PUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE:
Spatial Literacy: Contemporary Asante Women’s Place-making by Epifania Akosua Amoo-Adare
Folklore, Gender, and AIDS in Malawi: No Secret Under the Sun by Anika Wilson
Democracy at Home in South Africa: Family Fictions and Transitional Culture by Kerry Bystrom
What Gender is Motherhood?: Changing Yorùbá Ideals of Power, Procreation, and Identity in the Age of Modernity by Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí
WHAT GENDER IS MOTHERHOOD?
CHANGING YORÙBÁ IDEALS OF POWER, PROCREATION, AND IDENTITY IN THE AGE OF MODERNITY
WHAT GENDER IS MOTHERHOOD?
Copyright © Oyèrónké Oyewùmí 2016
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2016 978-1-137-53877-2
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission. In accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
First published 2016 by PALGRAVE
MACMILLAN
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Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG21 6XS.
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ISBN: 978-1-349-58051-4
E-PDF ISBN: 978–1–137–52125–5
DOI: 10.1057/9781137521255
Distribution in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world is by Palgrave Macmillan®, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Oyewùmí, Oyèrónké, author.
Title: What gender is motherhood? : changing Yorùbá ideas on power, procreation, and identity in the age of modernity / by Oyèrónké · Oyewùmí.
Other titles: Gender and cultural studies in Africa and the diaspora. Description: New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. | Series: Gender and cultural studies in Africa and the diaspora | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015023978
Subjects: LCSH: Motherhood—Nigeria. | Ifa (Religion) | Gender identity—Nigeria. | Oyo (African people)
Classification: LCC HQ759 O95 2015 | DDC 306.874/308996333—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015023978
A catalogue record for the book is available from the British Library.
In Praise of Iya
Mo f ‘ire fún Òṣun Mo f ‘ire fún Ọya
Mo fọ ire fún gbogbo àwọn ìyá
Afìmọ̀ f’obìnrin, Iye wa táa pé nímọ̀
Afìmọ̀ jẹ t’Ọṣun o, Iye wa táa pé nímọ̀ Ǹjẹ́, ẹ jẹ́ ká wólẹ̀ f’obìnrin
Obìnrin ló bí wa
Ka wa to dènìyàn Ẹ jẹ́ ká wólẹ̀ f’obìnrin
Obìnrin lọ́ b’Ọ́ba
K’ọ́ba ó tó d’Òr ìṣà
Introduction: Exhuming Subjugated Knowledge and Liberating Marginalized Epistemes
1. Divining Knowledge: The Man Question in Ifá
2. (Re)Casting the Yor ùbá World: Ifá, Ìyá, and the Signification of Difference
3. Matripotency: Ìyá in Philosophical Concepts and Sociopolitical Institutions
4. Writing and Gendering the Past: Akọ̀wé and the Endogenous Production of History
5. The Gender Dictaters: Making Gender Attributions in Religion and Culture
6. Toward a Genealogy of Gender, Gendered Names, and Naming Practices
7. The Poetry of Weeping Brides: The Role and Impact of Marriage Residence in the Making of Praise Names
8. Changing Names: The Roles of Christianity and Islam in Making Yor ùbá Names Kosher for the Modern World
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The completion of this book represents another stage in my intellectual journey. During the long process of producing it, I drew on the generosity and support of a number of individuals and institutions. First, I want to thank my colleague Adélékè Adéẹ̀kó for reading drafts of the evolving manuscript from the very beginning of the project to its completion. He has always patiently read anything I sent him, and his comments prompt me to refine my ideas. I am especially grateful to him for making available to me his expertise in Yor ùbá language, offering his translations of words and phrases and applying diacritical marks to my Yor ùbá-language texts.
I thank Tolulope Idowu, my friend from youth, who read numerous versions of the manuscript from the very beginning of the process. She was always willing to read the crudest of my drafts, offering helpful suggestions and applying her strong editorial skills. My friend Diana Cassells listened patiently on a daily basis to my ideas, read various parts of the manuscript, and was especially helpful in providing insightful comments about the Yor ùbá Diasporic experiences in Cuba and Brazil.
I am grateful to Filomina Steady, friend, mentor and colleague, who read a draft of the manuscript and shared her considerable knowledge and experience unstintingly throughout the writing process. In addition, the following friends and colleagues read all or parts of the manuscript and offered useful comments:Tushabe Tushabe, Abosede George, Abena Asare, Olakunle George, and Marame Gueye. Olasope Oyelaran also gave me the benefit of his knowledge of Yor ùbá society and letters. My colleague Akintunde Akinyemi drew my attention to recent studies on oriki and Oyo oral traditions including his own. Thank you for your insights and the book. Farooq Kperogi and Muhammad Shakir Balogun read chapters of the manuscript, shared their extensive knowledge of Islam, and gave insightful comments on the impact of Islam on the naming practices of various ethnic communities in Nigeria including Hausa, Yor ùbá, and Batonum. To them both, I offer my gratitude.
I owe a load of thanks to my friend and colleague Jimi Adesina for his encouragement and unwavering support over the years. I appreciate my
sista and colleague Cheryl Sterling for her encouragement and willingness to share her knowledge of the workings of the academy.
It is a compliment to a scholar when another scholar takes up his or her work and looks at it critically. It is in that spirit that I hope my examination of the work of intellectuals writing on Yor ùbá culture will be taken. In this regard, I wish to thank Toyin Falola for responding by email to my questions about aspects of his writings on Samuel Johnson, the pioneer Yor ùbá local historian. I am also grateful to him for lending books and documents from his formidable library when I could not get them anywhere else.
I cannot thank enough my research assistants Titilayo Halimat Somotan and Emma Wilhelmina Parker Halm, and Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi, who put in an inordinate number of hours in preparing the manuscript for publication. I am especially indebted to Ademide who dropped everything and came to the rescue at the last minute, solving technical glitches as we adhered to the publisher’s guidelines. To my long-standing editor extraordinaire and friend Lindsey Reed, I have benefitted from your ideas and skill over many years, and this book is no exception. I am deeply appreciative of your efforts.
I would like to acknowledge a series of grants from the Stony Brook University:The Provost’s Fine Arts, Humanities and Social Science (FAHSS) initiative. These grants supported me over three summers, allowing me to go to Ogbomoso, Nigeria, to conduct research.
I must acknowledge the babalawo in Ogbomoso, who gave generously of their time and knowledge, contributing significantly to the quality of my work. In this regard, I cannot thank enough babalawo Chief Akalaifa and his son Olayode Akalaifa (now deceased), who gave many hours of their time and knowledge to educate me about Ifa and Orisa Devotion. Olayode introduced me to an Orisa Devoted congregation in Ogbomoso named Ijo Elesin Ifa Adimula, Irunmole Parapo. It was on my visit to this house of worship that the 15-year-old girl Fafunso Oyetayo explained the procedure of the religious service to me. I appreciate them all. Chief Olagoke Adio Akanni, Araba Oluawo Ogbomoso, the head of the Babalawo in the town, granted me many interviews. He answered my numerous questions and also shared numerous Ifa verses. I am grateful.
Special thanks to the anonymous reviewers whose comments and questions prodded me to refine the manuscript.
This book is about motherhood. My gratitude must start with my very own iya, Igbayilola, the model of matripotency, who showed me the way, and from whom I gained much knowledge and experience. I am grateful to my children Olasunbo, Akinboye, and Mapate for choosing me and making me their mother. My omooya are always there to support me. I appreciate them all: Bolanle, Aderemi, Ademola, Oyewole, and Oyekemi for their
encouragement. Eku oro iya o. I am appreciative of my father, His Royal Majesty Oba Oladunni Oyewumi, Laronke, and awon iya in the palace, who were always ready to entertain my questions, share their knowledge and experiences: most especially Iya Saki. Over the years, Soun’s Palace has been a superb space for apprehending “culture” for a culture fiend like me.
I must not forget my aunt Nkanlola, who always accompanied me on my interview rounds with babalawo. Finally, I appreciate my friends Bose Afolabi and Olajide Bello for their unwavering support. I was especially encouraged by their rapt attention whenever I discussed my visits to the babalawo.
I take full responsibility for the content of this book.
A NOTE ON ORTHOGRAPHY
Yor ùbá is a tonal language, with three underlying pitch levels for vowels and syllabic nasal: the low tone is marked with a grave accent; the midtone is unmarked; and the high tone is marked with an acute accent. I have used tonal accents and subscript marks (e.g., ẹ, ọ, ṣ). Some syllables require two diacritics, as in my last name, Oyěwùmí, where an acute accent joins with a grave accent over the e to form a v. As to the subscript marks: the ẹ is approximately equivalent to the e in the English word “yet”; the ọ is close to the sound in “dog”; and the ṣ is close to the English “sh” sound. I have used tonal marks on the Yor ùbá words and names that are part of my text. However, there are many Yor ùbá names, especially of scholars, that remain unmarked because up to this point, the tendency has been to discount the diacritics in African languages. Yet, without the diacritics, those words do not make sense.
EXHUMING SUBJUGATED KNOWLEDGE AND LIBERATING MARGINALIZED EPISTEMES
Societies that have experienced colonization have suffered many ill effects, some psychological, some linguistic, and some intellectual. But none have perhaps been less studied than how colonization subjugates knowledge and marginalizes local epistemes. This book aims to take endogenous categories and epistemologies seriously, focusing on the production of knowledge in the Yor ùbá society of southwestern Nigeria and exploring the extent to which indigenous concepts, ideas, and language are taken into account in academic research. Paying close attention to language, endogenous discourses, and local knowledge systems, I hope to provide a new understanding of a number of important institutions and social practices such as Ifá, motherhood, marriage, and family. This study draws on data collected over a long period of time, starting with my dissertation research in Ibadan and Ogbomoso in the 1980s and continuing to the present. Significantly for this book, I also conducted interviews with diviners in Ogbomoso.
This volume develops themes first presented in my book The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (1997), in which I exposed gender as a historically recent category in Yor ùbá culture, one that emerged with European colonization of both the society and its knowledge systems. Concomitantly, I demonstrated that prior to colonization, endogenous Yor ùbá hierarchies were based on seniority gained through age, rather than on gender, which, I argued, was a Western patriarchal value. I posited that gender is a colonial category.
One of the themes that emerged from my investigation of gender in Yorùbá society is the role of writing and scholars in interpreting and therefore representing the culture. All too often, I found, research betrayed a glaring lack of understanding of local realities. In fact, many researchers who had written about gender in Yorùbá culture did not recognize—indeed never even did a
systematic analysis of—current, everyday, every time, gender-neutral categories of kinship and the related seniority-based organization of families and social groups. For so many academics, both local and foreign, indigenous categories and experiences did not seem to drive their work, at least not in the first instance. From the perspective of knowledge making, Yorùbá categories of knowledge—the ways in which the culture codified and organized information—tended in the main not to influence scholarly claims and conclusions.
In the current book What Gender Is Motherhood? Changing Yorùbá Ideals of Power, Procreation, and Identity in the Age of Modernity, then, questions of knowledge and gender and the role of intellectuals take center stage. In exploring the intersections of knowledge making and gender, I focus on Ifá, the most important endogenous system of knowledge. My interest in Ifá stems from its significance in the culture—its historical depth and its continuing resonance in postcolonial society. Taking seriously the traditional Yor ùbá nongendered ontology, I explore how gender is implicated in interpretations of the Ifá knowledge system, as social and ritual practice, and as a cultural institution in a changing world.
At the center of this book is a discussion of the institution of Iya (motherhood), historically the most consequential category in social, political, and spiritual organization. The objective is to document the indigenous epistemology that has been shunted aside as the new gender-saturated colonial epistemology gains ever-deeper resonance in the culture.The argument here is that the category Iya is not originally a gender category. It is this chapter that informs the title of the book: What Gender Is Motherhood? I introduce the concept of “matripotency”—supremacy of motherhood—as a lens through which to appreciate and understand the discounted Yor ùbá epistemology. More than anything else, the different construction of motherhood demonstrates the seismic epistemic shift occasioned by European colonization and policies, the establishment of notions of individualism, Christianization, Islamization of the culture, and globalization.
The global context for knowledge production is crucial to understanding the origins and trajectory of academic research and knowledge production on Yor ùbá society. Therefore, in this introduction, I wish to use the concept of the coloniality of power to unpack the culture and practices of institutions of higher learning and the ways in which the race and gender identities of intellectuals enable or disable their quest to contribute to the wealth of human knowledge.
The Coloniality of Power, Gender, and Knowledge
The global hierarchies that we inhabit today are the legacy of a process that started in 1492, involving what Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano
calls the “coloniality of power,” a system that defines modernity. At the core of Quijano’s articulation of the coloniality of power is the idea that the racial superiority of Euro/Americans was constituted during this period, and most importantly, that their dominance over other groups, whom they racialized, was deemed to be natural. The notion that white racial superiority is inherent in the human condition was offered as an explanation of why Europeans dominate other groups, an idea that displaced the earlier belief that control of subordinated groups was based on force. Quijano described the ways in which racialized colonial domination influenced both knowledge making and the power embedded in it:
Repression fell, above all, over the modes of knowing, of producing knowledge, of producing perspectives, images and systems of images, symbols, modes of signification, over the resources, patterns, and instruments of formalized and ob- jectivised expression, intellectual or visual. It was followed by the imposition of the use of the rulers’ own patterns of expression, and of their beliefs and images with reference to the supernatural. [ . . . ] The colonizers also imposed a mystified image of their own patterns of producing knowledge and meaning.1
It was the global imposition of Eurocentric patterns of organizing knowledge that my earlier book The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses challenged. In that volume, I exposed gender as a colonial category, calling into question the idea that gender categories are natural, universal, and inherent in the way in which human communities organized and thought about themselves. In this manner, my work dovetails with some of the issues raised by Quijano, although his focus is on race. But race and gender are inseparable, as we have learnt from intersectional theory and the fact that there is a matrix of domination in human social organization. Maria Lugones writes about the need to incorporate gender in comprehending the coloniality of power. She is essentially correct when she states that “colonialism did not impose precolonial, European gender arrangements on the colonized. It imposed a new gender system that created very different arrangements for colonized males and females than for whites.”2
Gender, then, is a category central to the construction and organization of knowledge in our time. My research showed that in Yor ùbá society in the past, gender was not a factor for classifying information. Hence, I pointed out that the idea in Western feminist discourses that the social category woman and her subordination are universals contradicts another passionately held feminist tenet that gender is socially constructed. I argued that if gender is socially constructed, then there must have been a time during
which it was not constructed. I posit therefore that if the constitution of gender as a social category is a product of culture (space), it must also be recognized to be a product of history (time). Invention traces the emergence of gender categorization in Yor ùbá society of southwestern Nigeria to European imperialism of body, mind, and knowledge. Drawing evidence from family organization, language, the division of labor, religion, and oral traditions, I show that unlike in the West, gender was not originally part of the Yor ùbá conceptual framework for making sense of the social world. Instead, British colonization, which was both a racial and gendered process, was instrumental in the establishment of the existing gender systems in this region.
Thus the study concludes that gender, as a mode of organizing society, is simply not inherent in human nature. Although currently gender has become universal, I assert that this development must be understood in historical terms. The groundbreaking book Invention inaugurated a paradigm shift in the understanding of gender as a social construct by insisting that our investigations should not take gender for granted but must ask questions about how it is constituted and when, where, and how it came into being in a given locality. The thesis put forth in my work denaturalized and deuniversalized gender, a construct that Euro/Americans are able to impose around the world, given their global power. To borrow Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s apt phrase, Invention sought to “provincialize the West”3 to recognize that the West is but one region of the geographical and social world, and therefore its institutions, practices, and ways of being do not represent a universal human norm.
In much of Africa, provincializing the West is an epic struggle, given the erasure of African cosmologies, demonization of indigenous religion, destruction of institutions, Othering of persons, and the epistemicide that resulted from colonial conquest. Attempts at decolonization of spaces, bodies, and minds have had little impact, because Africans tend to misunderstand the phenomenon itself. They are like their white colonizers, who self-interestedly think that the removal of white bodies from the polity (aka independence) necessarily “decolonizes.” But this is not so, as historian Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni explains. And it is especially not so as regards knowledge production in Africa, which he describes as being “deeply ensnared within the colonial matrix of power and reproduces Western ideational domination on the African continent.”4
The depth of the problem faced by Africa having passed through European colonization is captured by the distinction that is made between coloniality and colonialism. Following Nelson Maldonado-Torres, NdlovuGatsheni writes:
The concept of coloniality is different from colonialism as it refers to longstanding patterns of power that emerged from colonialism and continue to define culture, labor, intersubjective relations and knowledge production long after the end of direct colonialism. It is that continuing dominating phenomenon that survived colonialism. It is hidden in discourses, books, cultures, common sense, academic performances, and even self images of Africans . . .Africans have breathed and lived coloniality since their colonial encounters and it continues to shape their everyday life today.5
For the purposes of this introduction, I would like to single out the prevailing cultural pattern undergirding systems of knowledge through a recent experience. In January 2015, I was one of the panelists at a conference in a college in Massachusetts, United States. During one of the plenary sessions, I heard the chairperson advise participants from the floor to say their names and the preferred pronouns with which they are to be addressed, as they stood up to ask questions of the panelists. The chairperson was not a comedian, nor was her statement nonsensical, as it would seem to the uninitiated. Rather, it was a response to the challenge that transgender persons pose to English-speaking historically women’s colleges in particular, and other human communities more generally.
An article in the New York Times sums up the salient points associated with the changing notions of gender and gender identity through the story of a student at the University of Vermont:
Gieselman dumped the girlie name bestowed at birth, asked friends and teachers to use Rocko, the tough-sounding nickname friends had come up with, and told people to use “they” instead of “he” or “she.” “They” has become an increasingly popular substitute for “he” or “she” in the transgender community, and the University of Vermont, a public institution of some 12,700 students, has agreed to use it . . .The university allows students like Gieselman to select their own identity—a new first name, regardless of whether they’ve legally changed it, as well as a chosen pronoun—and records these details in the campuswide information system so that professors have the correct terminology at their fingertips.6
At the conference that evening, I was not so certain that I would be able to keep up with the customized pronouns that my student-audience would conjure, but I was amused at the very idea of choosing one’s own personal pronoun. What a pity, I thought. Learn to speak Yor ùbá! North Americans would not have to reinvent the wheel if they adopted Yor ùbá, one of the many African languages whose pronouns and personal names do not “do gender.”
In a similar vein, I was reminded of anthropologist Ifi Amadiume’s statement many moons ago about the antics of Western feminists “European feminists . . . seek possible ways out of their historically oppressive patriarchal family structure . . . inventing single-parenthood and alternative affective relationships . . . In the African case we do not need to invent anything.”7
In any case,Yor ùbá do not need to invent a new language, new pronouns, or new names, because their language is not organized on the basis of gender categories; hence there are no gendered pronouns, no gendered names, or gendered kinship categories. If Geiselman and other transgendered persons operated in Yor ùbá language, they would not have had to invent any new vocabulary to express their identity. So the Western colonizers who would “civilize” the natives were actually imposing on Africans their own crude languages with their gendered preoccupations, gender binaries, and gender discriminatory and male-dominant ideologies. Unfortunately, given the global hierarchy that is a hallmark of modernity, learning is unidirectional: Africans must learn from Europeans and Americans (including their pathologies); Africans, on the other hand, are not perceived to have anything of value that they could teach the West. Thus the original nongenderness of Yor ùbá language becomes invisible as native speakers adjust their vocabulary to model the English language.
Language, however, is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the institutions imposed by colonial modernity. Unfortunately, we have to qualify Amadiume’s notion that Africans don’t need to invent anything, because the African elite have been so schooled in Western race and gender primitivism that today many fail to recognize that African societies had their own spiritual identities and distinct ways of thinking and organizing before European conquest. They are so entrenched in Western ways that they must relearn local languages and even names—if they care enough to do so. On the huge significance of colonial languages anthropologist Maxwell Owusu reminds us,
one of the subtler and more effective weapons of imperial supremacy was the European language. Subject peoples were obliged to adopt and use it if they wished to succeed in the colonial world. In time the colonized African was made to believe that anything written in a colonial language is sacrosanct, infallible and beyond question.8
Marginalization of endogenous languages, erasure of memory, jettisoning of episteme, othering of cultures and bodies, demonizing of the Gods and ancestors, and destruction of social institutions are some of the key elements associated with Africa’s experience of colonialism.
What Gender Is Motherhood?
In my previous book, Invention, I wrote about the epistemic shift occasioned by the imposition of gender and male dominance on Yor ùbá society by the European colonizers: colonial officials and missionaries. In the current book, What Gender Is Motherhood? Changing Yorùbá Ideals of Power, Procreation, and Identity in the Age of Modernity, I name the exact nature of the shift as a move away from the indigenous seniority-based matripotent ethos to a male-dominant, gender-based one. In this study, I am concerned with the intersections of power, gender, history, and knowledge making, and the role of intellectuals in the process. In exploring the intersections of knowledge and gender, I focus on Ifá, the most important endogenous system of knowledge and divination. In the first two chapters of the book, I apply the finding of a nongendered ontology to the institution of Ifá and explore how gender is implicated in interpretations of the knowledge system, as social and ritual practice, and as a cultural institution in a changing world. In this chapter, I examine what I call “the man question” in Ifá, as opposed to the standard Eurocentric “woman question,” as the most apposite way of analyzing gender in Ifá texts.
Chapter 2 interrogates the work of a group of scholars who have imposed gender binaries on Ifá. These authors consciously write about women in Ifá and Yor ùbá society in general, seemingly in response to the worldwide development of gender and feminist studies, disciplines that in the past four decades have insisted on the importance of the category in contemporary life. Some of these writings respond to my own earlier work questioning the imposition of male dominance on primordial Yor ùbá institutions.
Chapter 3 is on the all-important institution of Iya. The chapter documents the indigenous epistemology that has been shunted aside as the new gender-saturated colonial epistemology gains ever-deeper resonance in the culture. I posit that the category Iya is not originally a gender category. It is this chapter that informs the title of the book: What Gender Is Motherhood? I introduce the concept of “matripotency”—supremacy of motherhood—as a lens through which to appreciate and understand the marginalized Yor ùbá epistemology. More than anything else, the different construction of motherhood demonstrates the seismic epistemic shift in thinking occasioned by European colonization and policies, the establishment of notions of individualism, Christianization, Islamization of the culture, and globalization.
The title-question “What Gender Is Motherhood?” is posed against the background of the fact that in Western discourses that determine intellectual concepts and theories, motherhood is a paradigmatic gender category. However, gender is a social and historical construct; thus we must not impose Euro/American categories on Yor ùbá unquestioningly. As I showed
in Invention, Yor ùbá society ontologically did not operate on the basis of gender. Without gender, what then is the traditional Yor ùbá understanding of procreation and the institution of motherhood? What meanings are attached to the events and processes associated with human reproduction and attendant social reproduction? And what are the implications of these ideas for the organization of society, concepts of identity, and spirituality?
In chapter 4, continuing with the spotlight on intellectuals, I consider the historical place of writing and the gendered status of literate persons in the culture. Akòwé, a word for literate Yor ùbá that originated in the nineteenth century, was applied to males only, despite the obvious presence of females who were literate. I explore the relationship between the gender identity of pioneering, local, nonacademically trained writers, and the academics that followed them. This analysis sets the stage for considering the work of two prominent scholars of Yor ùbá religion and their writings on gender in chapter 5.
The last three chapters, 6–8, are strongly interconnected and are a work of historical sociology. Through a study of Yor ùbá names, naming systems, and social change, I investigate the emergence of gender markers in society. Starting from the nineteenth century as a period of great ferment and social change, I examine new names, new institutions, new practices, and an emergent gender consciousness. What these emerging categories tell us about the historicity of gender in Yor ùbá society is one of the driving questions of this chapter and indeed of the project as a whole. Fundamentally, what does the construction of gender in Yor ùbá society tell us about the same process in other societies.
Throughout the text, although I refer to Yor ùbá people, my primary focus is on the Oyo-Yor ùbá, which is a dominant subgroup of the nationality. As I noted in Invention, my primary focus is on Oyo-Yor ùbá history and culture. That said, it should be noted that those cultural specificities were more pronounced before the sweeping changes that occurred in the civil war and the post-nineteenth-century periods—I should add that language is central to my study, and my engagement is with the Yor ùbá language as spoken by the Oyo initially but much of which became universalized as the language was standardized through writing.
The terms “Global North” and “Global South” have become current in designating what was once known as the “First World” and “Third World” countries, respectively. The Global North is also increasingly used to designate the West or the Western world comprising countries in Western Europe and North America (excluding Mexico). In this book, I have chosen to retain the West as my preferred designation of these societies.
CHAPTER 1
DIVINING KNOWLEDGE: THE MAN
QUESTION IN IFÁ
The primordial Yor ùbá1 social organization was a seniority-based system. In the society, the main principle of social relations was seniority defined by relative age. Thus the older person in any social interaction or institutions that are deemed to be of older vintage are privileged in the culture. As an institution, seniority is socially constructed and chronological age is not its only feature. In other contexts, chronology is reckoned differently. For example, in the case of twin births, the first infant to emerge from the birth canal is regarded as the junior and the second is the privileged senior, a convention encapsulated in their names: Táíwò for the junior and Kéhìndé for the senior. In the culture, the belief is that Táíwò, the àbúrò (junior), came out of the birth canal first because Kéhìndé, the ègbón (senior), had sent her on an errand to go to the world first and ascertain if it is a hospitable place. Another context in which the seniority hierarchy exposes a different form of accounting than chronological age is its usage in families. In patrilocal marriages, the in-marrying bride is regarded as junior to all the members of the groom’s lineage no matter their biological age. In this instance, the seniority ranking is predicated on when each and every member of the lineage entered the patrilineage whether through marriage or through birth. The chronology of brides entering the family through marriage is reckoned from the day they married into the family and not the day they were born. The juniorizing of brides in the families into which they are married does not take away from their chronological age-based positions in the families of their birth or in the society as a whole. The fundamental fact that originary Yor ùbá social relations are based on seniority was laid bare in my book The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. 2
Concomitantly, the thesis in the book challenged the idea that gender categorization is natural and universal to the human condition. I showed
that gender is not ontological to the Yor ùbá ethos, and thus the presence of identifiable gender constructs in the language, history, and social institutions is at best evidence of recent social change and at worse confirmation of an alien imposition. The most important point is that the seniority-based system does not draw attention to the anatomy or genitalia as gender systems do. Seniority privileges social relations rather than the type of the body. Therefore, a seniority-based system is fluid and more egalitarian given that each person in society can be junior or senior in interactions depending on the situation. Seniority, unlike gender, is relational and speaks to the collective ethos rather than to individual identity. Thus, I concluded that the current presumption of gender and attendant male dominance in the interpretation of endogenous Yor ùbá institutions, social practices, and values represents an epistemological shift away from the seniority-based system.
In this chapter then, my objective is to interrogate the ways in which gender constructs have been imposed on Ifá and the implications of this for understanding the institution in particular, and the society as a whole. If á is a knowledge system. It occupies an important place in the culture, lives, and imagination of the people, and as such investigating the role of gender and male dominance in this venerable institution is necessary. Although I made references to If á at various points in Invention, I centered my analysis on other social institutions such as lineage, marriage, the economy, and language. In this chapter and the next, I aim to do a focused analysis of If á as an institution, using gender as probe. My goal is to investigate and expose the ways in which If á has been imprinted with gender, represented as a maledominant institution, and in the process create further understanding of the ongoing institutionalization of male dominance in the culture as a whole.
Academic discussions of gender in If á are usually framed around the “woman question,” a question that does not originate from the senioritybased system. Approaches to gender constructs, expressed as male dominance in these writings, are of the “images of women” variety. Two papers, for example, “The Image of Women in If á Literary Corpus”3 and “Images of Women in the If á Literary Corpus,”4 make exactly this point. Two problems are immediately apparent with this orientation: academic writings on gender in Yor ùbá society do not problematize gender categories but assume them to be natural and integral to the culture and knowledge system. Second, no matter how many images of women these authors present, their approach exhibits an inherent antifemale bias, because in searching for images of women in If á, they have already defined it as a man’s world. In these representations, men are the normative category, and women then are treated as the subsidiary to the putative male world. Because primordial Yor ùbá society was seniority and not gender-based, the woman question is an invalid premise from which to start analysis of its social institutions.
Of course social institutions do evolve, but research must take history into account.
Thus I propose that the “man question”5 instead is the more apposite perspective from which to understand contemporary Yor ùbá society and its cultural institutions. I use the man question to encapsulate ideas of male dominance and male privilege that have come to define societies around the globe especially following European and American conquests. Yor ùbá society has not escaped Western domination and European predilection for using gender constructs to organize and interpret the universe and the social world.
Thus the man question represents an attempt to ask why Yor ùbá society is increasingly a gendered and male-dominant world. When and how did this happen? The point is that we cannot take male dominance for granted given the original seniority-based system; its presence demands explanation. The normative categories man and woman are marked by their origins from a gender system. In a gendered dispensation, “man,” an anatomical biological entity, is regarded as dominant and superior, in opposition to woman, another category, which is considered inferior and subordinate. Although, man/male and woman/female are used to express the biological distinction between the two types of anatomy, the categories go beyond mere distinction but contain social baggage in which one category is deemed to be worthier than the other. In Western culture, ultimately, these anatomies symbolize social and moral attributes.
Dominant Western gender categories and the hierarchies they represent did not exist in the original Yor ùbá seniority-based system. In the senioritybased arrangement, the human anatomy or genitalia does not express any distinct social or moral attributes. Thus the Yor ùbá categories ọkùnrin (usually translated as male/man/boy) and obìnrin (usually translated as woman/ female/girl) represent mistranslation in that they introduce gender hierarchy where there was none.6 Elsewhere, I have demonstrated that the Yor ùbá distinctions are superficial and are merely expressing anatomic difference without any social or moral connotations. As a result of this finding I introduced two concepts: anatomic male and anatomic female, which I abbreviated to anamale and anafemale as the correct translation of Yor ùbá categories ọkùnrin and obìnrin. Anamale and anafemale better express the meaning of Yor ùbá classification of the human body as one in which the categories in and of themselves do not constitute any social hierarchy.7
It is clear that the standard woman question that studies of postcolonial African societies so easily utilize in their research is an imposed question that derives from European colonization and the current dominance of Western epistemologies in the constitution of knowledge worldwide. Consequently, a brief genealogy of the woman question is necessary. In
the nineteenth century, the woman question was articulated by women’s rights activists in England and the United States as an interrogation of the nature and role of women in society as English and white American women started to agitate for political rights and challenge their gender subordination. In these societies, as far back as they could tell, men were the dominant gender. Privileged politically, and socially regarded as the norm, the male was universalized as representing the human. Taken for granted, the dominance of men in Western societies was believed to be universal and therefore natural. Thus in much of feminist writings even when they questioned the naturalness of male dominance, its universality was never in question. But this was erroneous, imperialistic, and self-aggrandizing thinking on the part of Europeans and Americans because there were many cultures around the world in which gender categorization and male dominance were absent originally. Yor ùbá culture was one of these: the central principle of social ethos was seniority. Nevertheless, with the conquest of Africans by Europeans, there was a wholesale forcing of Western values, social institutions, and practices on the colonized. Language was one of those institutions whose imposition profoundly affected the colonized and continues after the end of formal colonialism. In the next section, I consider the implications of using the English language to represent and interpret If á, an endogenous knowledge system.
What Is Ifá?
If á is a system of knowledge that was transmitted orally originally. Structured into the institution are a set of procedures that facilitate the retrieval of information on all aspects of Yor ùbá life past, present, and future. This knowledge is made accessible through a system of divination, a process that generates stories, myths, and narratives that profess to be God send, and which make assertions about anything and everything in Yor ùbá life. As literary scholar Adélékè Adéẹ̀kó puts it, If á narratives claim “divine origins and expressly assert the authority to make proclamations regarding the essential being of every object and idea, from the beginning of time and extending into the limitless future.”8 Thus If á is seen as a comprehensive record of Yor ùbá culture providing historical precedents for events and conduct, and guidance for the future. If á is not the only system of divination in Yor ùbá society, but it has garnered hegemonic importance vis-à-vis other forms of divination as a result of the interest in it on the part of the Westernized Yor ùbá elite and Western scholars.9 Consequently, our understanding of the place of If á in the culture has not been immune from social change attending colonization. Before the twentieth century, If á and other divination systems were hugely important in Yor ùbá life. Throughout the life cycle of individuals,
families, and sociopolitical entities (states), in times of joy and in times of trouble, people would consult If á diviners to make sense of their lives and destiny. One of the most significant rituals performed when a child is born is to consult a babaláwo (If á diviner) to decipher aspects of the child’s destiny, especially as it relates to which Òr ìṣà (deity, God) presides over his or her fate. We see a description of this ritual practice in the work of anthropologist William Bascom, who produced one of the first scholarly documentation of If á. In his tome Sixteen Cowries: Yorùbá Divination from Africa to the New World, researched in the 1930s, we learn that Salako, an anamale diviner of Éér ìndìnlógún, another divination system who worked with the anthropologist, described his visit as an infant to If á diviners so that they could perform the customary àkọsèjáyé (deciphering baby’s first earthly steps). Bascom writes about Salako: “Shortly after his birth he was taken to an If á diviner and his foot was placed on the divining tray; the diviner consulted If á and confirmed that he belonged to Orishala.”10
Consulting If á represents a central part of the ceremonies marking rites of passage. In pre-Islamic and pre-Christian Yor ùbáland, every individual had to memorize what was called ọwó Ifá kan—one hand of If á—units of verses and narratives of If á.This mass training represented schooling in Yor ùbáland at the time.11 It is no wonder, then, that much of the language of If á is so familiar to the Yor ùbá ear: many of the figures of speech (parables, metaphors, similes) in everyday language come directly from If á narratives. But of course one could also interpret this as a sign that If á narratives are a product of persons albeit knowledge makers who are a part of the culture. If á was venerated in the society and even today, despite the fact that Islam and Christianity have become dominant religions in the culture, the phrase ó gbón bi’fá as wise as If á—is still used for complimenting intellectual achievement.
If á is a divination system, and such systems are by definition modes of seeking knowledge. There are quite a number of divinatory systems in Yor ùbáland, but If á and Éér ìndínlógún, which are closely related, are widely recognized as the most important. If á divination is presided over by diviners called babaláwo, a professional guild of practitioners. When a client consults them, they manipulate a divining chain (ọ̀pẹ̀lẹ̀) or sixteen ritually blessed palm nuts (ikin) a number of times, which eventually leads to recitation of a specific odù (chapter), which tell a story that is deemed appropriate to the situation of the client who is seeking knowledge about a particular predicament or issue. These stories are regarded as precedents. Babaláwo have spent many years memorizing the If á corpus that is the basis of their profession. This corpus is large, consisting of 256 chapters, but the number of verses present in each chapter is undetermined.
Traditionally, the way to access If á knowledge was through divination presided over by babaláwo. Today, there are other ways to access the
information: through divination that customizes the information to an individual situation, through interviews with diviners, or through reading scholarly books that have sought to compile the odù or chapters of If á knowledge. Bascom’s Ifá Divination: Communication between Gods and Men in West Africa was the first academic treatment of If á in the English-speaking world. Before this publication, there had been studies of aspects of If á by Yor ùbá Christian missionaries in Yor ùbá language, with various degrees of sophistication.There had also been studies by French scholars researching in West Africa and still more studies in Spanish and Portuguese based on the Yor ùbá Diaspora in the Americas. Two decades after his first book, Bascom published Sixteen Cowries: Yorùbá Divination from Africa to the New World. Wande Abimbola published his dissertation Ifá: An Exposition of Ifá Literary Corpus and has subsequently published additional books on If á. Other book-length studies of If á have been written more recently, including Ifá: The Ancient Wisdom by Afolabi A. Epega, Ifá Festival by Abosede Emmanuel, and Ifá: A Complete Divination by Ayo Salami. If á also constitutes part of òr ìṣà devotion, which is the endogenous religion of the Yor ùbá people. In this tradition, the God Òr únmìlà is the owner of the divination system. Sometimes If á and Òr únmìlà are used synonymously; however, in this study, If á will refer to the divination system, and Òr únmìlà will refer to the deity who presides over it. My focus on If á draws from the divination system, the diviners, scholars and their writings, and my own research and interviews I conducted with diviners in Ogbomoso at different times between 2007 and 2012.
The Language of Translation12
The majority of Yor ùbáland13 was formally colonized by the British (1852–1960) as part of the colony that they named Nigeria. During the colonial period, male dominant institutions, laws, and policies were imposed extensively on the society.These developments in turn have had an untold impact on endogenous institutions and social practices.14 One notable institution that has an immediate relevance for our discussion of If á—the indigenous knowledge system—is the English language. Under British colonization, English was imposed as the official language of the country and this has remained so ever since. Thus, despite the fact that the original language of If á is Yor ùbá, much of the scholarship on it has been conducted in English, essentially through translation. This fact of constantly translating from Yor ùbá into the English language, coupled with the reality that the primary audience for such writings is an English-speaking one, has enormous consequences for how If á is written about and interpreted, and for the type of “knowledge” generated. A basic contradiction apparent in these
translations is that English, the target language, is a gendered language in which the male category is privileged, and Yor ùbá, the source language, is a seniority-based one in which social categories did not indicate the type of anatomy. To illustrate this significant point, there are no gendered names, pronouns, or kinship categories in Yor ùbá language. Hence words denoting son, daughter, brother, or sister are not part of the indigenous vocabulary. Instead the principle underlying Yor ùbá kinship categories is seniority. The kinship categories ègbón (older sibling) and àbúrò (younger sibling) and the third person pronouns ó (singular) and wón (they, formal) demonstrate the seniority hierarchy. This significant point is lost on many translators of Yor ùbá who inadvertently introduce gender into social life and erase the indigenous values merely through translation. This point is easily demonstrated with the imposition of English gendered pronouns through what elsewhere I have called the ubiquitous “he.” This process is clear in the following poetry and its translation taken from the Wande Abimbola’s book Ifá: An Exposition of Ifá Literary Corpus.15
1. Ó ní
2. Oníkéké logún;
3. Alágbàjà lọgbọ̀n;
4. Oníkolo làádọta;
5. A díá fún Ọdúnmbákú
6. Tí í sọmọ bíbí inú Àgbọnnìrégún.
7. Wón ní ó rúbọ nítor í Ikú.
8. Ó ṣe é,
9. Ikú ò pa á.
10. Ọdún mbá kú,
11. Ejié ti gb’ádìẹẹ̀ mi lọ.
12. Adìẹẹ̀ mi,
13. Adìẹerànà,
14. Tí mo fi’ílẹ̀
15. Lejié gbé lọ 16
1. One who has (my translation because Abimbola did not translate this line)
2. He who has kéké facial marks has twenty markings;
3. He who has àbàjà facial marks has thirty markings;
4. He who has kolo facial marks has fifty markings;
5. If á divination was performed for Ọdúnmbákú
6. Who was the son of Àgbọnnìrègún.
7. He was asked to perform a sacrifice.
8. In order to avert imminent death,
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use of the monks in their devotions. This summary of the first contents of the library is taken by Hardy from the Gesta Abbatum, a chronicle of St. Albans.
The literary interests of Paul were, it appears, continued by a large proportion at least of his successors, and many of these made important contributions to the library. Geoffrey, the sixteenth abbot, gave to the scriptorium a missal bound in gold, and another missal in two volumes, both incomparably illuminated in gold and written in an open and legible script. He also gave a precious illuminated psalter, a book containing the benediction and sacraments, a book of exorcism, and a collectory. (The description is taken from the Gesta.)
Ralph, the seventeenth abbot, was said to have become a lover of books after having heard Wodo of Italy expound the Scriptures. He collected with diligence a large number of valuable manuscripts. Robert de Gorham, who was called the reformer of the liberty of the Church of St. Albans, after becoming prior, gave many books to the scriptorium, more than could be mentioned by the author of the Gesta. Simon, who became abbot in 1166, caused to be created the office of historiographer Simon had been educated in the abbey, and did not a little to add to its fame as a centre of literature. He repaired and enlarged the scriptorium, and he kept two or three scribes constantly employed in it. The previous literary abbots had for the most part brought from without the books added to the collection, but it was under Simon that the abbey became a place of literary production as well as of literary reproduction. He had an ordinance enacted to the effect that every abbot must support out of his personal funds one adequate scribe. Simon presented to the abbey a considerable group of books that he had himself been collecting before his appointment as abbot, together with a very beautiful copy of the Old and New Testaments.
The next literary abbot was John de Cell, who had been educated in the schools of Paris, and who was profoundly learned in grammar, poetry, and physics. On being elected abbot, he gave over the management of the temporal affairs of the abbey to his prior, Reymond, and devoted himself to religious duties and to study. Reymond himself was a zealous collector, and it was through him
that was secured for the library, among many other books, a copy of the Historica Scholastica cum Allegoriis, of Peter Comester. The exertions of these scholarly abbots and priors won for St. Albans a special distinction among the monasteries of Britain, and naturally led to the compilation of the historic annals which gave to the abbey a continued literary fame. Hardy is of opinion that these historic annals date from the administration of Simon, between the years 1166 and 1183.
Richard of Wendover, who succeeded Walter as historiographer, compiled, between the years 1230 and 1236, the Flores Historiarum, one of the most important of the earlier chronicles of England. Hardy points out that it could have been possible to complete so great a work within the term of six years, only on the assumption that Richard found available much material collected by Walter, and it is also probable that other compilations were utilised by Richard for the work bearing his name. It is to be borne in mind that the monastic chronicles were but seldom the production of a single hand, as was the case with the chronicles of Malmesbury and of Beda. The greater number of such chronicles grew up from period to period, fresh material being added in succeeding generations, while in every monastic house in which there were transcribers, fresh local information was interpolated until the tributary streams had grown more important than the original current. In this manner, the monastic annals were at one time a transcript, at another time an abridgment, and at another an original work. “With the chronicler, plagiarism was no crime and no degradation. He epitomised or curtailed or adapted the words of his predecessors in the same path with or without alteration (and usually without acknowledgment), whichever best suited his purpose or that of his monastery. He did not work for himself but at the command of others, and thus it was that a monastery chronicle grew, like a monastery house, at different times, and by the labour of different hands.”
Of the heads that planned such chronicles or of the hands that executed them, or of the exact proportion contributed by the several writers, no satisfactory record has been preserved. The individual is lost in the community.
In the earlier divisions of Wendover’s chronicle, covering the centuries from 231 down to about 1000, Wendover certainly relied, says Hardy, upon some previous compilation. About the year 1014, that narrative, down to the death of Stephen, showed a marked change in style, giving evidence that after this period some other authority had been adopted, while there was also a larger introduction of legendary matter. From the accession of Henry II., in 1235, when the Flores Historiarum ends, Wendover may be said to assume the character of an original author. On the death of Richard, the work of historiographer was taken up by Matthew Paris. His Lives of the Two Offas and his famous Chronicles were produced between the years 1236 and 1259.
In certain of the more literary of the English monasteries, the divine offices were moderated in order to allow time for study, and, under the regulations of some foundations, “lettered” persons were entitled to special exemption from the performance of certain daily services, and from church duty.[145]
At a visitation of the treasury of St. Pauls, made in the year 1295, by Ralph de Baudoke, the Dean (afterwards Bishop of London), there were found twelve copies of the Gospels adorned, some with silver, and others with pearls and gems, and a thirteenth, the case (capsa) containing which was decorated not merely with gilding but with relics.[146] The treasury also contained a number of other divisions of the Scriptures, together with a Commentary of Thomas Aquinas. Maitland says that the use of relics as a decoration was an unusual feature He goes on to point out that the practice of using for manuscripts a decorated case, caused the case, not infrequently, to be more valuable than the manuscript itself, so that it would be mentioned among the treasures of the church, when the book contained in it was not sufficiently important to be even specified.
The binding of the books which were in general use in the English monasteries for reference was usually in parchment or in plain leather. The use of jewels, gold, or silver for the covers, or for the capsæ, was, with rare exceptions, limited to the special copies retained in the church treasury. William of Malmesbury in the
account which he gives of the chapel made at Glastonbury by King Ina, mentions that twenty pounds and sixty marks of gold were used in the preparation of the Coöpertoria Librorum Evangelii. [147]
The Earlier Monastery Schools.
—At the time when neither local nor national governments had assumed any responsibilities in connection with elementary education, and when the municipalities were too ignorant, and in many cases too poor, to make provision for the education of the children, the monks took up the task as a part of the regular routine of their duty. The Rule of S. Benedict had in fact made express provision for the education of pupils.
An exception to the general statement concerning the neglect of the rulers to make provision for education should, however, be made in the case of Charlemagne, whose reign covered the period 790 to 830. It was the aim of Charlemagne to correct or at least to lessen the provincial differences and local barbarities of style, expression, pression, orthography, etc., in the rendering of Latin, and it was with this end in view that he planned out his great scheme of an imperial series of schools, through which should be established an imperial or academic standard of style and expression. This appears to have been the first attempt since the time of the Academy of Alexandria to secure a scholarly uniformity of the standard throughout the civilised world, and the school at Tours may be considered as a precursor of the French Academy of modern times. For such a scheme the Emperor was dependent upon the monks, as it was only in the monasteries that could be found the scholarship that was required for the work. He entrusted to Alcuin, a scholarly English Benedictine, the task of organising the imperial schools. The first schools instituted by Alcuin in Aachen and Tours, and later in Milan, were placed in charge of Benedictine monks, and formed the models for a long series of monastic schools during the succeeding centuries. Alcuin had been trained in the cathedral schools founded in York by Egbert, and Egbert had been brought up by Benedict Biscop in the monastery of Yarrow, where he had for friend and fellow pupil the chronicler Bede. The results of the toilsome journeys taken by Biscop to collect books for his beloved monasteries of Wearmouth
and Yarrow[148] were far-reaching. The training secured by Alcuin as a scribe and as a student of the Scriptures, the classics, and the “seven liberal arts” was more immediately due to his master Ælbert, who afterward succeeded Egbert as archbishop.
The script which was accepted as the standard for the imperial schools, and which, transmitted through successive Benedictine scriptoria, served seven centuries later as a model for the first typefounders of Italy and France, can be traced directly to the school at York.
Alcuin commemorated his school and its master in a descriptive poem On the Saints of the Church at York, which is quoted in full by West.[149] In 780, Alcuin succeeded Ælbert as master of the school, and later, was placed in charge of the cathedral library, which was at the time one of the most important collections in Christendom. In one of his poems he gives a kind of metrical summary of the chief contents of this library. The lines are worth quoting because of the information presented as to the authors at that time to be looked for in a really great monastic library. The list includes a distinctive though very restricted group of Latin writers, but, as West points out, the works “by glorious Greece transferred to Rome” form but a meagre group. The catalogue omits Isidore, although previous references make clear that the writings of the great Spanish bishop were important works of reference in York as in all the British schools. It is West’s opinion that the Aristotle and other Greek authors referred to were probably present only in Latin versions. These manuscripts in the York library were undoubtedly for the most part transcripts of the parchments collected for Wearmouth and Yarrow by Biscop.
The Library of York Cathedral.
There shalt thou find the volumes that contain All of the ancient Fathers who remain; There all the Latin writers make their home With those that glorious Greece transferred to Rome, The Hebrews draw from their celestial stream, And Africa is bright with learning’s beam.
Here shines what Jerome, Ambrose, Hilary thought, Or Athanasius and Augustine wrought. Orosius, Leo, Gregory the Great, Near Basil and Fulgentius coruscate.
Grave Cassiodorus and John Chrysostom Next Master Bede and learned Aldhelm come, While Victorinus and Boëthius stand With Pliny and Pompeius close at hand.
Wise Aristotle looks on Tully near, Sedulius and Juvencus next appear. Then come Albinus, Clement, Prosper too, Paulinus and Arator. Next we view Lactantius, Fortunatus. Ranged in line Virgilius Maro, Statius, Lucan, shine.
Donatus, Priscian, Phobus, Phocas, start The roll of masters in grammatic art. Entychius, Servius, Pompey, each extend The list. Comminian brings it to an end.
There shalt thou find, O reader, many more Famed for their style, the masters of old lore, Whose many volumes singly to rehearse Were far too tedious for our present verse.[150]
Alcuin’s work on the Continent began in 782, when, resigning his place as master of the cathedral school in York, he took charge of the imperial or palace school at Tours. His work in the palace school included not only the organisation of classes for the younger students, but the personal charge of a class which comprised the Emperor himself, his wife Luitgard, and other members of the royal or imperial family. Whether for the younger or for the older students, however, the instruction given had to be of a very elementary character. The distinctive value of the work was, it is to be borne in mind, not in the extent of the instruction given to the immediate pupils, but in making clear to the Emperor and to his sons who were
to succeed him, the importance of securing a certain uniformity of script and of educational work throughout the Empire.
It is very probable that not a few of the earlier copyists who completed in the scriptoria the tasks set for them by the instructors trained in Tours and in Aachen, transcribed texts the purport of which they had not mastered. It was through their work, however, that the texts themselves were preserved and were made available for later scribes and students who were competent to comprehend the spirit as well as the letter of their contents.
Mabillon is in accord with later authorities such as Compayré and West, as to the deplorable condition of learning at this time throughout the Empire ruled by Charles. Says West: “The plight of learning in Frankland at this time was deplorable. Whatever traditions had found their way from the early Gallic schools into the education of the Franks had long since been scattered and obliterated in the wild disorders which characterised the times of the Merovingian kings.... The copying of books had almost ceased, and all that can be found that pretends to the name of literature in this time is the dull chronicle or ignorantly conceived legend.”[151]
A description such as this emphasises the importance of the work initiated by Alcuin, work the value of which the ruler of Europe was fortunately able to appreciate and ready to support. In his relation to scholarly interests in Europe and to the preservation of the literature of the past, Alcuin may fairly be considered as the successor of Cassiodorus. He was able in the eighth century to render a service hardly less distinctive than that credited to Cassiodorus three hundred years earlier. There is the further parallel that, like Cassiodorus, he possessed a very keen and intelligent interest in the form given to literary expression, and in all the details of the work given to the copyists. The instructions given in Alcuin’s treatise on orthography for the work of the scribes, follow very closely in principle, and differ, in fact, but slightly in detail from, the instructions given by Cassiodorus in his own treatise on the same subject. A couplet which stands at the head of the first page reads as follows: “Let him who would publish the sayings of the ancients read me, for
he who follows me not will speak without regard to law.”[152] Alcuin’s care in regard to the consistency of punctuation and orthography and his intelligent selection of a clearer and neater form of script than had heretofore been employed, have impressed a special character on the series of manuscripts dating from the early portion of the ninth century and written in what is termed the Caroline minuscule. In a letter written to Charles from Tours in 799, Alcuin mentions that he has copied out on some blank parchment which the King had sent him a short treatise on correct diction, with illustrations from Bede. He goes on to speak of the special value to literature of the distinctions and subdistinctions of punctuation, the knowledge of which has, he complains, almost disappeared: “But even as the glory of all learning and the ornaments of wholesome erudition begin to be seen again by reason of your noble exertions, so also it seems most fitting that the use of punctuation should also be resumed by scribes.... Let your authority so instruct the youths at the palace that they may be able to utter with perfect elegance whatsoever the clear eloquence of your thought may dictate, so that whatsoever may go to the parchment bearing the royal name it may display the excellence of the royal learning.”[153] A very delicate hint, remarks West, for Charles to mind his commas and his colons.
Up to the time of Charlemagne there appears to have been so little facility in writing and so few scribes were available, that government records were not kept even at the Courts. The schools established by Alcuin at Tours, under the direction of Charlemagne, were in fact the first schools for writers which had existed in Western Europe for centuries. One of the earlier applications made of the knowledge gained in the imperial schools was for the critical analysis of certain historical documents which had heretofore been accepted as final authorities. In the earlier centuries of the Middle Ages, anything that was in writing appears to have been accepted as necessarily trustworthy and valuable, very much as in the earlier times of printing the fact that a statement was in print caused it to be accepted as something not to be contradicted. The critical faculty, combined with the scholarly knowledge necessary and properly applied, was, however, of slow growth, and centuries must still have passed
before, in this work of differentiating the value of documents, the authority of scholars secured its full recognition.
After this work of Alcuin began, that is to say, after the beginning of the ninth century, it became the rule of each properly organised monastery to include, in addition to the scriptorium, an armarium, or writing-chamber, which was utilised as a class-room for instruction in writing and in Latin. In a letter of Canonicus Geoffrey, of St.-Barbeen-Auge, dated 1170, occurs the expression, Claustrum sine armario est quasi castrum sine armamentario, [154] (a monastery without a writing-chamber is like a camp without a storehouse of munitions or an armory.)
The Capitular of Charlemagne, issued in the year 789, addressed itself to the correction of the ignorance and carelessness of the monks, and to the necessity of preserving a standard of correctness for the work of transcribing holy writings. It contains the phrase:
Et pueros vestros non sinite eos vel legendo vel scribendo corrumpere. Et si opus est evangelium, psalterium et missale scribere, perfectæ ætatis homines scribant cum omni diligentia.
(Do not permit your pupils, either in reading or writing, to garble the text;—and when you are preparing copies of the gospel, the psalter, or the missal, see that the work is confided to men of mature age, who will write with due care.)
The following lines were written by Alcuin as an injunction to pious scribes:
AD MUSÆUM LIBROS SCRIBENTIUM.
Hic sedeant sacræ scribentes famina legis, Nec non sanctorum dicta sacrata patrum. His interserere caveant sua frivola verbis, Frivola ne propter erret et ipsa manus, Correctosque sibi quærant studiose libellos, Tramite quo recto penna volantis eat.
Per cola distinguant proprios et commata sensus. Et punctos ponant ordine quosque suo,
Ne vel falsa legat taceat vel forte repente, Ante pios fratres lector in ecclesia.
. . . . .
(Quoted from the Vienna Codex, 743. Denis, i., 313.)
Wattenbach is of opinion that these lines stood over the door of the scriptorium of S. Martin’s Monastery.
West says that the lines were written as an injunction to the scribes of the school at Tours. He gives the following version, which takes in certain further lines of the original than those cited by Wattenbach:
“Here let the scribes sit who copy out the words of the Divine Law, and likewise the hallowed sayings of the holy Fathers. Let them beware of interspersing their own frivolities in the words they copy, nor let a trifler’s hand make mistakes through haste. Let them earnestly seek out for themselves correctly written books to transcribe, that the flying pen may speed along the right path. Let them distinguish the proper sense by colons and commas, and let them set the points each one in its due place, and let not him who reads the words to them either read falsely or pause suddenly. It is a noble work to write out holy books, nor shall the scribe fail of his due reward. Writing books is better than planting vines, for he who plants a vine serves his belly, but he who writes a book serves his soul.”[155]
In a manuscript which was written in S. Jacob’s Monastery in Liége, occurred the following lines:
Jacob Rebeccæ dilexit simplicitatem, Altus mens Jacobi scribendi sedulitatem. Ille pecus pascens se divitiis cumulavit, Iste libros scribens meritum sibi multiplicavit. Ille Rachel typicam præ cunctis duxit amatam, Hic habeat vitam justis super astra paratam.[156]
[(The Hebrew) Jacob loved the simplicity of Rebecca,
The lofty soul of (the monk) Jacob (loved) the work of the scribe.
The former accumulated riches in pasturing his flocks, The latter increased his fame through the writing of books.
The former won his Rachel, loved beyond all others. May the scribe have the eternal life which is prepared above the stars for the just.]
The most important of the works of Alcuin that can be called original were his educational writings, comprising treatises On Grammar, On Orthography, On Rhetoric and the Virtues, On Dialectics, A Disputation with Pepin, and a study of astronomy entitled De Cursu et Saltu Lunæ ac Bissexto. West mentions three other treatises which have been ascribed to him: On the Seven Arts, A Disputation for Boys, and the Propositions of Alcuin. [157] Alcuin was more fortunate than his great predecessor Cassiodorus in respect to the preservation of his writings. Manuscripts of all of these remained in existence until the time came when the complete set of works could be issued in printed form, and the work of the old instructor could be appreciated by a generation living a thousand years after his life had closed. He died at Tours in 804, in his seventieth year. Mabillon speaks of Alcuin as “the most learned man of his age.” Laurie is disposed to lay stress upon the monastic limitations of his intellect, and thinks that his principal ability was that of an administrator; West emphasises the “pure unselfishness of his character,” and adds, with discriminating appreciation: “We must also credit him with a certain largeness of view, in spite of his circumscribed horizon. He had some notion of the continuity of the intellectual life of man, of the perils that beset the transmission of learning from age to age, and of the disgrace which attached to those who would allow those noble arts to perish which the wisest of men among the ancients had discovered.... Perceiving that the precious treasure of knowledge was then hidden in a few books, he made it his care to transmit to future ages copies undisfigured by slips of the pen or mistakes of the understanding. Thus in every way that lay within his power, he endeavoured to put the fortunes of
learning for the times that should succeed him in a position of advantage, safeguarded by an abundance of truthfully transcribed books, interpreted by teachers of his own training, sheltered within the Church and defended by the civil power.”[158] Professor West’s appreciative summary does full justice to the work and the ideals of Charlemagne’s great schoolmaster. I should only add that in the special service he was in a position to render in the preservation, transmission, and publication of the world’s literature, Alcuin must be accorded a very high place in the series of literary workers which, beginning with Cassiodorus, includes such names as Columba, Biscop, Aurispa, Gutenberg, Aldus, Estienne, and Froben.
The most noteworthy of the successors of Alcuin in the palace school at Tours was John Scotus Erigena, who in 845 was appointed master by Charles the Bold. The influence of the Irish monk widened the range of study and gave to it an active-minded and speculative tendency that brought about a wide departure from the settled conservatism which had always characterised the teaching of Alcuin. The list of books given to the scribe for copying was increased, and now included, for instance, works of such doubtful orthodoxy as the Satyricon of Martianus Capella, a voluminous compilation constituting a kind of cyclopædia of the seven liberal arts. Its composition dates from about 500.[159]
In a treatise, De Instituto Clericorum, written in 819 (that is, during the reign of Louis I.), by Rabanus Maurus, who was Abbot of Fulda and later, Archbishop of Mayence, is cited the following regulation: “The canons and the decrees of Pope Zosimus have decided that a clerk proceeding to holy orders shall continue five years among the readers ... and after that shall for four years serve as an acolyte or sub-deacon.” (The Zosimus referred to was Pope for but one year, 417-418.) Rabanus had just before remarked, “Lectores are so called a legendo.” He goes on to say that “he who would rightly and properly perform the duty of a reader must be imbued with learning and conversant with books, and must further be instructed in the meaning of words and in the knowledge of the words themselves,” etc.[160] Rabanus follows this with a series of very practical instructions and suggestions for effective education on the part of the
readers. These were based upon the treatise on elocution written nearly two hundred years earlier by the learned Bishop Isidore of Seville, and they were again copied three years after the time of Rabanus by Ibo, Bishop of Chartres, in the treatise De Rebus Ecclesiasticis. Maitland, to whom I am indebted for this citation, finds cause for indignant criticism of the historian Robertson for the superficial and misleading references made by the historian to the dense ignorance of the Church in the Middle Ages. Maitland suggests that if Robertson had applied for holy orders to the Archbishop of Seville in the seventh century, the Archbishop of Mayence in the ninth, or the Bishop of Chartres in the eleventh, he would have found the examination rather more of a task than he expected. West speaks of Rabanus as “Alcuin’s greatest pupil,” and as intellectually “a greater man than his master.”[161] He wrote a long series of theological and educational treatises.
From the Constitutions of Reculfus, who became Bishop of Soissons in 879, it is evident that he expected the clergy to be able both to read and to write. The Bishop says: “We admonish that each one of you should be careful to have a Missal, a Lectionary, a Book of the Gospels, a Martyrology, an Antiphonary, a Psalter, and a copy of the Forty Homilies of S. Gregory, corrected and pointed by our copies which we use in the holy mother Church; and also fail not to have as many sacred and ecclesiastical books as you can get, for from these you shall receive food and condiment for your souls.... If, however, any one of you is not able to obtain all the books of the Old Testament, at least let him diligently take pains to transcribe for himself correctly the first book of the whole sacred history, that is, Genesis, by reading which he may come to understand the creation of the world.”[162] The counsel was good, even although a perfectly clear understanding of the creation might after all not have been secured.
By the close of the ninth century, a large proportion of the monasteries of the Continent and of England carried on schools which were open to the children of as large a district as could be reached. In many cases, the elementary classes were succeeded by classes in advanced instruction, while from these were selected
favourites or exceptionally capable pupils, who enjoyed in still higher studies the advantage of the guidance and service of the best scholars in the monastery. West, in summing up the later influence of Alcuin, speaks of the stream of learning as having flowed from York to Tours and from Tours (through Rabanus) to Fulda, thence to Auxerre, Ferrières, Corbies (old and new), Reichenau, St. Gall, and Rheims, one branch of it finally reaching Paris.[163] Mabillon speaks of the abbey schools of Fleury as containing during the tenth and eleventh centuries as many as five thousand scholars.
In Italy, the most important schools were those instituted at Monte Cassino, Pomposa, and Classe. Giesebrecht is, however, of opinion that the educational work of the Italian monasteries was less important than that carried on by the monasteries in Germany, France, or England. In Germany, the monasteries which have already been mentioned as centres of intellectual activity were also those which had instituted the most important and effective of the schools, the list including St. Gall, Fulda, Reichenau, Hirschau, Wissembourg, Hersfeld, and many others.
In France and Belgium, the names of the conspicuous abbey schools include those of Marmoutier, Fontenelle, Fleury, Corbie, Ferrières, Bec, Clugni. In England, the most noteworthy of the abbey schools were St. Albans, Glastonbury, Malmesbury, Croyland, and S. Peter’s of Canterbury. From the epoch of Charlemagne to that of S. Louis, the great abbeys of Christian Europe served in fact not only as its schools but as its universities. The more intelligent of the nobility and the kings themselves were interested in securing for their children the educational advantages of the monastery schools. Among the French kings who were brought up in this way are to be named Pepin the Little, Robert the Pious, and Louis the Fat. In Spain, Sancho the Great, King of Navarre and of Castile, was a graduate of the monastery of Leyre.
In England, we have the noteworthy example of Alfred, who was not ashamed, after having reached mature years, to repair his imperfect education by attending the school established in Oxford by
the Benedictines, where he is said to have studied grammar, philosophy, rhetoric, history, music, and versification.[164]
A large number of the convents, following the example of the abbeys, contained schools in which were trained not only the future novices, but also numbers of young girls destined for the life of the Courts or of the world.
Mabillon finds occasion to correct the impression on the part of some writers of the sixteenth century, that the monasteries had been established solely for the purpose of carrying on educational work. He writes: C’est une illusion de certains gens qui ont écrit dans le siècle précédent que les monastères n’avaient esté d’abord établis que pour servir d’écoles faisantes profession d’enseigner les sciences humaines.
De Rancé, who wrote a Traité de la saincteté et du devoir de la vie monastique, took the ground that the pursuit of literature was inconsistent with the monastic profession, and that the reading of the monks ought to be confined to the Scriptures and a few books of devotion. The treatise was understood to be an attack upon the Benedictine monks of St. Maur, for that they were learned was a matter of general knowledge, and the monks of La Trappe, the Order with which De Rancé had associated himself, had an old-time antagonism to their scholarly neighbours. It may be considered as a good service for literature and for monastic history that the treatise of De Rancé, narrow and unimportant in itself as it was, should have been published. Nine years later, in the year 1691, was issued the reply of the Benedictines, the learned and valuable Traité des Études Monastiques of Dom Mabillon, which will be referred to more particularly in the following chapter.
The historians of these monastic schools have laid stress upon the limited conceptions possessed by their founders and by the instructors, of the purpose and possibilities of education, conceptions which of necessity affected not only the work done in the schoolroom, but the character of the literature produced in the scriptoria. Laurie, for instance, writes as follows: “The Christian conception of education was, unfortunately (like that of old Cato), narrow. It tended
steadily to concentrate and to contract men’s intellectual interests. The Christian did not think of the culture of the whole man. He could not consistently do so. His whole purpose was the salvation of the soul.... Salvation was to be obtained through abnegation of the world and through faith.... Christianity, accordingly, found itself necessarily placed in mortal antagonism to ‘Humanitas’ and to Hellenism, and had to go through the troublous experiences of nearly 1400 years before the possibility of the union of reason with authority, of religion with Hellenism, could be conserved.... As was indeed inevitable, theological discussion more and more occupied the active intellect of the time, to the subordination, if not total neglect of humane letters and philosophy. The Latin and Greek classics were ultimately denounced. As the offspring of the pagan world, if not indeed inspired by demons, they were dangerous to the faith.”[165]
From the Apostolic Constitutions, ascribed to the middle of the fourth century, Mr Bass Mullinger quotes the injunction: “Refrain from all the writings of the heathen: for what hast thou to do with strange discourses, laws, or false prophets, which, in truth, turn aside from the faith those who are weak in the understanding ... wherefore abstain scrupulously from all strange and devilish books.”[166]
It was S. Augustine who said Indocti cœlum rapiunt—“It is the ignorant who take the kingdom of heaven,”—and Gregory the Great who asserted that he would blush to have Holy Scripture subjected to the rules of grammar [167] West speaks of the conceptions of grammar and of rhetoric taught by Alcuin as “crude” and “puerile,” and of his theories of language as “childish.”
It is, of course, a truism to point out that the educational work done by Alcuin and the other great instructors of the monastic schools is not to be judged by the standard of later ages. The students for whose training they were responsible, whether children or adults, princes or peasants, must have been, with hardly an exception, in a very elementary condition of mental development, and it was necessary for the instruction to be in like manner elementary. In this study, I am, however, not undertaking to consider the history of
education in early Europe, a subject which has been so ably presented in the works of Mullinger, Laurie, Compayré, and West. I am concerned with the work of these early schoolmasters simply because to their persistent efforts was due the preservation of literature in Europe. If Alcuin and his successors had done nothing else than to secure a substantially uniform system of writing throughout the great schools in which were trained abbots and scribes for hundreds of monasteries, they would have conferred an inestimable service upon Europe. But their work did go much further. Notwithstanding the various injunctions and warnings of ecclesiastical leaders against “pagan” literature, it proved impracticable to prevent this literature from being preserved and manifolded in numberless scriptoria. The record of the opposition has been preserved in a series of edicts and injunctions. But the fact that the interest in the writings of the ancients proved strong enough to withstand all the fulminations and censures is evidenced by the long series of manuscripts of the classics produced in the monasteries during the tenth and eleventh centuries. The writers of these manuscripts were the product of the schools instituted by Charlemagne and Alcuin.
The Benedictines of the Continent.—The
two writers who have given the largest attention to the record of the literary and scholarly work of the Benedictines during the seven centuries between 500 and 1200 , are Mabillon and Ziegelbauer Dom Mabillon was himself a Benedictine monk and had a full inheritance of the literary spirit and scholarly devotion which characterised the Order. He was born in Rheims in 1632, and his treatise on monastic studies, Traité des Études Monastiques, which has remained the chief authority on its subject, was published in Paris in 1691. Ziegelbauer’s Observationes Literariæ S. Benedicti appeared a century later.[168]
Mabillon’s work forms a magnificent monument not only to the learning, diligence, and literary skill of its writer, but to the enormous value of the services rendered, during a number of centuries, by the monks of his Order, in the preservation of literature from the ravages of barbarism and in the development of scholarship. Mabillon also
makes clear the lasting importance of the original initiative given to the literary labour of the Benedictines by the Rule of their founder. An important portion of the material upon which Mabillon’s treatise was based, was collected during a series of journeys made by him in company with his brother under the instructions first of the great minister Colbert, and later, of Le Tellier, Archbishop of Rheims, for the purpose of examining or of searching for documents relating to the royal family and of procuring books for the royal library. The first of these journeys, undertaken in the year 1682, was completed entirely within French territory and was entitled Iter Burgundicum The second covered a considerable portion of South Germany and Switzerland, and is known as the Iter Germanicum. The third was devoted to Italy, and is described under the title of Iter Italicum; while the fourth investigation was made in Alsace and Lorraine, and the record is entitled Iter Literarium in Alsatiam et Lotharingiam.
The plan of the journeys involved a thorough ransacking of as many libraries as they could secure admission to, the libraries being, with but few exceptions, contained in the monasteries. The immediate result of these journeys was the addition to the royal library of some three thousand volumes, chiefly collected in Italy, and the later result, the publication of the records above specified, which form a most valuable presentation of the condition of the monastic collections in the seventeenth century, and which give in their lists the titles of a considerable number of valuable works which have since entirely disappeared.
A century later than S. Benedict, an unknown hermit called “the Master” prepared a Rule under which monks were required to study until they reached the age of fifty.[169] The Rule of S. Aurelian and S. Ferreol rendered this regulation universal, and that of Grimlaïcus identified the character of the hermit with that of “doctor.”[170] In all countries where the Benedictine Orders flourished, literature and scholarship exercised an abiding influence. It is impossible, contends Montalembert, to name an abbey famed for the number and holiness of its monks which is not also noted for learning and for its school of literature. The Benedictine monks during the four or five centuries after the foundation of the Order certainly appear to have held
themselves faithful to the precept of S. Jerome, “A book always in your hand or under your eyes.” (Nunquam de manu necque oculis recedat liber.[171]) They also accepted very generally the example of Bede, who said that it had been for him always delightful either to learn, to teach, or to write.[172] Warton is authority for the statement that in the year 790 Charlemagne granted to the abbot and monks of Sithiu an unlimited right of hunting, in order that they might procure from the skins of the deer killed, gloves, girdles, and covers for their books. He goes on to say: “We may imagine that these religious were more fond of hunting than of reading. It is certain that they were obliged to hunt before they could read, and it seems probable that under these circumstances they did not manufacture many volumes.”[173] Maitland, in referring to the original text of the concession, finds, however, that this has been misread by Warton. The permission to hunt, for the useful purpose specified, was given not for the monks but for the servants of the monastery.
With all the great Benedictine monasteries, it was the routine to institute first a library, then a scriptorium for the manifolding of books, and finally schools, open, not only to students who were preparing for the Church, but to all in the neighbourhood who had need of or desire for instruction. The copies prepared in the scriptorium of the texts from the library were utilised in the first place for the duplicates needed of the works in most frequent reference, but more particularly for securing by exchange copies of texts not already in the library, and, in many instances, also for adding either to the direct wealth of the monastery (by exchange for lands or cattle) or to its income by making sale of the works through travelling monks or by correspondence with other monasteries.
The list of monasteries which became in this manner literary and publishing centres would include nearly all the great Benedictine foundations of both Britain and the Continent. There was probably, however, a greater activity during the period between 600 and 1200, in the matter at least of collecting and circulating books, in the monasteries of France than in those of Italy, Germany, or Britain; but more important even than Clugni, Marmoutier, or Corbie, in France, was the great Swiss abbey of St. Gall, an abbey the realm of which
reached almost to the proportions of a small municipality In the shade of its walls, there dwelt a whole nation, divided into two branches, the familia intus, which comprised the labourers, shepherds, and workmen of all trades, and the familia foris, composed of serfs, who were bound to do three days’ work in each week.
Within the monastery itself, there were, in the latter half of the tenth century, no less than five hundred monks, together with a great group of students. In Germany, the most noted of what might be called the literary monasteries during the ninth and tenth centuries were those of Fulda, Reichenau, Lorsch, Hirschau, and Gandersheim. It was in the latter that the nun Hroswitha composed her famous dramas. In France, in addition to those already specified, should be mentioned Fleury, St. Remy, St. Denis, Luxeuil, S. Vincent at Toul, and Aurillac. In Belgium, S. Peter’s at Ghent was, during the tenth century, the most important of the scholarly monasteries. In England, in addition to the earlier foundations, already referred to, of Wearmouth and Yarrow, St. Albans and Glastonbury became the most famous. Before the eleventh century, the literature that came into existence from contemporary writers or reproductions of the works of classic writers outside of the monasteries must have been very trifling indeed. One of the most noteworthy publications which emanated from St. Gall was the great dictionary or Vocabulary bearing the name of Solomon (Abbot of St. Gall and later, Bishop of Constance), a work which was in fact a kind of literary and scientific encyclopædia. This manuscript, comprising in all 1070 pages, was put into print in the latter part of the fifteenth century.[174] The records of the famous library of the monastery have been brought together by later scholars, and it is their testimony that the manuscripts contained in it were among the most beautiful and accurate specimens of caligraphy known. These St. Gall manuscripts were also noted for their exquisite miniatures and illuminations. The parchment used for them was prepared by the hands of the monks, and they also did their own binding.[175] The fame of Sintram, one of the most noteworthy of the copyists, was
