A very cool post at Babelstone re: the first appearance of Ogham in a manuscript....

PEAA Awards Additional

Its been suggested that I add a new category to the voting: Best Podcast on Medieval Subject. Consider it added.

PEAA Awards

Just a reminder to send in your nominations for the PEAA awards, I'll announce the winning nominations after the 1st of the year, hopefully very soon after the beginning of the year.

PEAA Additional Categories

Let me add some categories, though I won't post these to the other blogs:

Best Journal Article of the Year

Best New Medieval Book of the Year

Best New Medieval Web Project of the Year

Best Use of Electronic Media of the Year

Best Medieval Movie/TV Show of the Year

Best Medievalism Web Site of the Year

Best Medievalism Book/Movie/TV of the Year

First Annunal Unofficial PEAA Awards

Announcing the first annual Praemium Ephemeridis Aetheriae Auctoribus awards (Award for Authors of Ethereal Diaries). Ok, I'm not that caffeined (rhymes with fiend) yet, so if you have a better name or acronym, write in. Anyway, here's the deal. Nominate the best medieval blog *entry* of the year that is not one written by you. So: medieval, an entry, written by someone other than the person nominating. Here are some categories I've thought of:

Award for Best Blog Entry of the Year

Award for Blog Entry that Fueled Research

Award for Blog That Best Serves the Medieval Community

Recognition for Best Electronic Article on a Medieval Topic

Award for Best Entry Making Fun of Ourselves

Write suggestions and nominations to larsprec AT gmail dot com

I'll collate and between the 25th and the 1st announce things that are gaining votes and announce those whom we wish to recognize after the first of the year.

The prize contains nothing other than the approbation of fellow medievalists.

Why I'm a Medievalist Meme Ruminated: Warning Terribly Autobiographical and Rambling!

Being on the job market has reminded me of "meme" not long ago that addressed why one becomes a medievalist. I started this journey a long, long time ago, well, a long time ago to me. While I've defended successfully, I'm still finishing the editing, so it'll be January before I have a piece of paper in hand. That's ten years after I walked in Paul Szarmach's office in the middle of snow storm to have our first face to face, a little over 12 years since I began to apply to graduate schools, and about 14 years since I had a sit down with myself and said I "gotta finally do this thing" and began researching what it would take to get me there and started buying books and reading. For me that's ahead of the story.

So how did I become a medievalist? I'd like to be able to list all these grand scholarly things that sound impressive....but I can't. I became a medievalist more or less through the back door and well, out of love.

My family has no tradition of higher education. My father's father, whom I never met, apparently went to college in Minnesota for awhile. I have notebooks that my father gave me where Granddad did his botany homework, drawing plants and making notes of their physical descriptions and properties. But when he went West to the then "wilds" of Montana, working to take the railroad across the state, he apparently left family and education behind. I know few details, as my Dad's family is dominated by my grandmother: anytime I ask my father or his siblings about Granddad, the focus quickly turns to Grandma. Anyway, point is, Granddad had a college education at the turn of the last century: and that's it. None of my father's siblings went to college, my father didn't even finish high school and later earned his degree.

My mother's side is new American. Both my mothers parents came to the US just a hair before the first world war, one in 1910 and the other in 1914. Both were of good, German, peasent stock, and when they married in 1915, they set up farming in North Dakota. Needless to say, they didn't go to college either, and neither did any of their children.


Well, that reading thing....reading was the one thing that I was good at all the way through school. So I read. All the time. English classes introduced me to adapted versions of the Aeneid and the Odyssey and Shakespeare and of all the stuff we read, I found that that was the literature I loved best. So when I went to library and slowly but surely my reading evolved into three areas of interest: current politics, history, esp. pre-modern, and classical and medieval literature. Now when my poor high school councilor was dubious about me making it in college he stirred my inner Beowulf. I was ok: areas I was good in I excelled, areas I wasn't, I bombed. Hence PSAT, SAT, and ACT scores were mixed and my grades were B average. Rather than rip his arm off, though, I worked like a dog. Since my councilor wasn't really going to help me much get into anything except the local college, which I didn't want to do, and my parents had no clue, and there was no internet to use, I started researching colleges at the public library. I had no idea what I was doing. Quite by chance, someone asked me about Seattle Pacific Univ and if I thought that would be a good school. I looked it up, applied, and got in.

Now, a major....given my interests at the time, I thought that I'd become a Relgion-Philosophy major. I spent the summer before and after my freshman year on fishing boats. The great thing about gill netting is that you have periods of intense activity, followed by a few hours of inactivity. So I'd sit on deck and read. I even had a library card for the Juneau Public Library--yes, I've seen Sarah Palin's house--well the governor's mansion which I walked by on my way to the library when we came into town after the weekly fishing period was done. Go to the laundromat, buy a shower while the clothes are in the washer, head up the hill past the mansion and over to the library was my weekly routine, return and set about swabbing decks, repairing and cleaning nets, and joy of joys....occasionally scrubbing the bottom of the boat....a most unpleasant of jobs. Give me shoveling manure any day of the week (yes, done that too). Anyway, I read on deck. I read all of Shakespeare, tried to read the Fairie Queene, read Augustine's Confessions and City of God, read all of C. S. Lewis and read Tolkien's Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, read Milton, read Chaucer, read the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Bible.....When I got to college however I found out that reading some Augustine and Aquinas wasn't the same as being a philosophy major. So I switched to Religion-Greek and Linguistics.

Ah...now there's something. I'd already had some German and Latin in high school. Now I added Greek and Hebrew and during a History of English course, discovered Old English and Beowulf...and I was in love! I think of it this way now: Greek is a great intellectual challenge that I love working in. Latin is like my lifeblood, I love working in Latin....but for those moments of linguistic FLOW, moments at which I completely lose myself and its all about the task in hand....those moments belong to working in Old English and Old Norse. I'm not sure yet where Old Irish and Hebrew fit on that scale, but I enjoy those too.

So, my career as a medievalist was sealed: I kept reading these texts, I loved learning and working in these languages. I can't point to some grand intellectual thing, but I can point all the way back to elementary school for the initial elements that led me to become a medievalist. It took me 14 years with stops and starts to get from college graduation to graduate school in medieval studies. But I did it for the simple reason that I love it: I love the stories, I love the manuscripts, I love the languages. Its my personal love affair with this material. And should it happen, heaven forfend, that I not be in academia, I love this material enough to grab that proverbial, figurative arm and rip it off: i. e. I'll still be working in it because I love the material.

So that's why I'm a medievalist. Nothing grand. Just a love affair that's been growing stronger for forty years now.

Spice

A few months ago, I read Spice: The History of a Temptation by Jack Turner and had intended to mention it here, but had forgotten. Now we've moved and the book is packed away in the 2 dozen book boxes we didn't have room for when we went from 2 bedrooms to 1 (meaning I lost my office at the same time I was losing my school office). And to boot, I'm out of town....and get to catch up on blog posts! Yay!

Anyway.....Spice.....now, I'm no expert on the history of potables and comestibles....far from such a state. Its something I want to look into and I've collected a few volumes to read up on when I suddenly have free time. I took History of the World in Six Glasses with me on a trip to Merry Olde Angleterre a few years back since there's about 8 hours of free time each way. (I actually had about 12 on the way there, but that's a different story and watched 6 movies while reading said book.) So to the book....

It isn't a scholarly tome. Its non-fiction, seems fairly well researched, but aimed at educated, interested, intelligent non-professional sorts of folk. I enjoyed it immensely, and at the back of the book the author includes a Narrative sort of "Works Cited". So it isn't footnotes, and it isn't just bibliography, but gives the reader good sources, both primary and secondary, to run to for further information.

The book was brought back to mind as I was deciding what of my spice store I was packing to bring with to T-giving holiday here in the USA. I do the cooking in my house, the price of marrying a much younger woman I suppose. But especially now that my wife's mother has passed, I do the cooking for her family too. Ok, those of you who have seen me in the flesh have probably realized that I look the way I do because I'm actually quite good at that cooking thing. So anyway...back to the book again....

Its a wide ranging study. It begins with the early modern period and talks about the beginnings of the modern spice trade as the Western powers go out in search of spices etc in the Far East. But then after the introduction we go backwards in time. But Turner, the author, does not tell simply a chronological tale.

I learned a great deal. There was material about ancient uses of spices, a find in Iran of a village from about 6000 BCE in which a spice from the Far East was found, and still rather fresh. Loads of good tidbits about the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians. But he doesn't neglect the medieval either. There was stuff from Bede and Aldhelm and Aelfric, and Christian comments about the wrongs of spicy foods and rents paid in pepper in the late middle ages. He illuminated the familiar too by looking at the land of Cockayne and its appearance in various sorts of medieval literature, and spice and its smell as signs of heaven. In the late medieval period, there were even spice mongers in lower class neighborhoods in larger cities, much less the personal spice expert to the nobles, who sometimes was at odds with the cook in the castle!

Turner details the double-mindedness of the Church: spices signified heaven, or the stink of hell depending on the need of the preacher. He also talks a bit about the uses of spices in medieval medicine which was interesting, even invoking an Anglo-Saxon charm as I recall. Fortunately he also debunks the common false preconceptions of the medieval period. For example, the wide spread use of spice to disguise rotten food (uh, no). He talks about spice as a status symbol in the medieval period, and the medieval diet. He even talks a little about spices as aphrodisiacs (though how our forebears thought that applying pepper to the male genitalia would Viagra-like aid in sexual performance is beyond me.)

In all, the thesis of the book is simply that spice and spices were catalysts for history: art, intellectual, and caused humans to act to get them. He proves that thesis I think.

This was a pretty easy read, geared as I said to a popular, educated, and intelligent audience though not necessarily the specialist. I learned a lot, even about things medieval, and looked at things I did know through a new lens that expanded my view of things, and eventually my teaching. I'd recommend this book.

Shivering me timbers

Wow. I was just at In The Middle and read Eileen Joy's post, ending with the introductory lines of one of her short stories. Here it is below. Fabulous line!

"History has many skins, layer upon layer of fragile papyrus, a thick apocrypha of facts and fictions, strands of white hair, cups full of brown teeth and jewelry gone green with rust."

I'm gonna have to steal that.....

Medieval Literature I Didn't Know II.a Bibliography

Just a quick one here. Not much has been written on the Letter to Sigeweard. Its a rich text, and it is now beginning to attract attention beyond just my own work. By the way, it has traveled under 3 names: Letter to Sigeweard (its a letter and its addressed to Sigeweard), Treatise on the Old and New Testaments (translation of the incipit in Laud 509), and Libellus or Libellus de veteri testamento et novo, the Latin incipit in Laud 509. In my work, I opted for "Letter to Sigeweard" since the text of the letter contains so much more than simply a discussion of the Bible.

At the time I started, this was just in process:
Hall, Thomas N. "Ælfric and the Epistle to the Laodiceans." Apocryphal Texts and Traditions in Anglo-Saxon England. Ed. Kathryn Powell and Donald Scragg. Publications of the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies 2. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003. 65-83.

Then followed news that Richard Marsden was updating the EETS volume edited by Crawford, S. J. The Old English Version of the Heptateuch, The Treatise on the Old and New Testament, and His Preface to Genesis, EETS os 160 (London: 1922) and will someday appear as The Old English Heptateuch and Ælfric's Libellus de veteri testamento et novo for EETS os 330 by OUP. When I exchanged emails with Dr. Marsden, it was to appear in Dec. 2006. Last May it was advertised at K'zoo by Boydell who handles EETS volumes as appearing in October. But the Oxford site now says Nov. 21, 2008. We'll see. And that's only volume 1!

The first editor of the text was William L'Isle whom I mentioned in my original post on the subject. He is the first modern editor, publishing in 1623 and stands as a bridge figure between Parker, Cotton and that generation of Old English scholars and Junius later in the 17th century. He was interested in establishing the theology of the Anglo-Saxon church to use in the ongoing Protestant Reformation especially in terms of the Bible in the vernacular and the Eucharist. Thus, his interest in the letter. His work is: A Saxon Treatise on the Old and New Testaments written at the time of King Edgar (Aboute 700 Yeares Agoe) by Aelfricus Abbas....(the title is hugely long) Printed by John Haviland for Henrie Seile, 1623. In 1638, after L'Isle's death, the book was reiussed as Divers Ancient Monuments....I should mention too that in addition to the Letter, L'Isle reprinted Matthew Parker's edition of an Easter sermon by Aelfric, that itself was the first printed Old English.

I'm told that the great Hugh Magennis has published a translation of the text in Metaphrastes, or, gained in translation: essays and translations in honour of Robert H. Jordan, Edited by Margaret Mullett and published by the Belfast Byzantine Texts and Translations series in 2004. I haven't seen it. Magennis also wrote an entry on it for the membership driven The Literary Encyclopedia that is online, but one can only read the first snippet for free. But from that, it appears to be mostly descriptive.

But that's all. There are no other articles or books on the Letter that I know of. There are many places, though not as many as one might think, where some aspect of the letter is discussed such as Paul Remley's Old English Biblical Verse or Hugh Magennis' Images of Community in Old English Verse. One curious reference is in Allen Frantzen's Before the Closet where Frantzen says that Sigeweard is a priest, which he wasn't. But these references usually have a paragraph or two to illustrate some point and move on. I should compile all these, but well, I have other projects to finish, including my editing!

Canon II

Wow, what a 2 months! I'm returning to catch up on a couple posts in the wings before moving on to new material. As the title to this one indicates, this post is responding to some issues raised in the comments on the first post on Canon that I thought better answered here than in the comments section, especially after more than a month has passed.

Ed Gallagher wrote in the comments:

A difficulty with your take on the rabbinic discussion of what "defiles the hands" is that the rabbis not only discuss writing material and styles, but also specific books. For instance, Ecclesiastes or Song of Songs (m. Yad 3.5). This seems to mean that certain books would not defile the hands under any conditions, while other books would defile the hands if they are written in a certain way. So the issue is one of sanctity (= defiling the hands), which can only occur if certain conditions are met. The book itself has to be holy (= canonical), and it has to be written in a certain way and on certain material. You are right to point out that more than just canonicity is involved, but I think that canonicity (= status as scripture) is one of the things involved.

First, let me challenge your definition of canonicity. I do not believe that we can equate "status as scripture", a religious and theological category with "canonical status" a literary category. The two may certainly overlap, especially in Judaism and Christianity, but both also developed canonical works and lists that are "scriptural", for example, and certainly the Greco-Roman world around them had canonical texts that were not scriptural, if they even understood what "scriptural" might be.

Second, you report the typical interpretation of the phrase. The problem as I see it is that it lacks evidence, and of course is contradicted by other dicta in the Mishnah's corpus. There is no evidence that the rabbis had in mind ALL copies of Ecclesiastes say and all translations in their pronouncement, and of course had no way to enforce it even if they did so mean it. Further, they don't bother to list for us all the books that "defile the hands." There is also that lovely debate between the Pharisees and Sadducees regarding the books of Homer, which according to the Pharisees the Saducees believe make the hands unclean. Are we seriously to believe that the keepers of the Temple and the High Priest's party placed Homer on a par with Moses, David, and the Prophets? Or reduce the comment to mere insult hurling, and the rabbis simply don't record the Saduceean response? The last speaker in rabbinic lit usually is the winner.

So here it is in a nutshell for me:
1) there is no evidence directly connecting the idea of sanctity to canonicity: i. e. that sanctity is the cause for a text to be considered canonical

2) There seems in some groups any way to be a way in which a holy text is not necessarily canonical: how else do we explain the reference to Homer and the Sadducees without a reduction to absurdity?

I rather think the direction flows the other way: the book was canonical, copies of it were in the Temple, it therefore must be determined if the object is holy or not. Thus, the canonical status comes first, the sanctity second rather than the majority of thinkers who have it the other way round.

I realize that this isn't an adequate response, especially for a view that goes against the usual interpretation and understanding. But it will have to do for now.

An Official Word

I passed. There's loads of editing to do before final submission of the dissertation, but the 5 members of my committee saw fit to pass me, and even praised sections of the work as being "groundbreaking" and "fascinating". I for one am quite pleased.

The Chaucer Rap

I found this rather amusing, from YouTube:

Chaucer Rap

Cotton Library Day

The Great Nokes over at Unlocked Wordhoard reminds everyone that today is Cotton Library day....the day in 1731 of the Ashburnham House, then housing the nascent national library, burned down in which much of the Cotton Collection suffered some kind of damage. For us Anglo-Saxonists of all stripes, it's a day to be grateful that we have what we have. The Great Nokes asks readers what their favorite Cotton manuscript is. I went with the obvious one: Cotton Vitellius A.xv.

But it reminded me to talk about a manuscript that *didn't* go through the Ashburnham House fire. I'm sure the one or two people reading this (and I can safely say with absolute certainty that neither reader is my mom or my spouse!) are saying "Huh?"

Oxford Bodleian Library Laud 509 is a copy of Aelfric of Eynsham's "translations" of the Heptateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Joshua, followed by Aelfric's sermon summarizing Judges). These are followed by Aelfric's letters to Wulfgat and Sigeweard, and then a copy of prose Life of Guthlac that is now a separate manuscript, London, British Library Cotton Vitellius D.xxi, but was originally the ending of Laud 509. The other main manuscript with the Hexateuch is also a Cottonian manuscript, Claudius B.iv and has the advantage of being wonderfully illustrated.

Ok, so, the attentive reader will have noted that Laud 509 has a copy of a text that is also in a Cottonian manuscript, and what's more part of Laud 509 remained with the Cottonian library, and obviously both went through the fire. So that should indicate that Laud 509 was once a part of the Cottonian Library...how did it come to Oxford and be designated Laud 509?

Well, there's a nice little story there, and I at least find it interesting. Laud 509 was in fact part of the Cotton Library. William L'Isle in the early 17th century became interested in learning Old English and to establish certain doctrines of the Anglo-Saxon church. The Protestant Reformation and Counter-Reformation were still in full swing and one of the points that L'Isle and other Protestants continued to argue was the doctrine of the Eucharist and the Biblical text in the vernacular. As is well known, the English Reformers used Aelfric and other Anglo-Saxon writers to justify their views. So L'Isle borrowed from Cotton the two manuscripts with the Hexateuch. He made notes from them and in them over the early years of the 17th century and returned the illustrated hexateuch in Claudius B.iv to Cotton as the more valuable of the two. He returned and reborrowed Laud 509 over the years and even offered an exchange of some of his manuscripts in return for 509. Cotton died, and after his death L'Isle simply kept the manuscript for his use in preparing a vernacular edition of the English Bible in Old English, a project that his own death prevented him from completing. It is apparent that at some point early on, Cotton himself separated the Guthlac from the other texts as there is no evidence of L'Isle's notes in that portion and that the Guthlac traveled with the Cotton Library and not with L'Isle's 509.

L'Isle died in the late 1630s and somehow the manuscript was acquired by Archbishop Laud, seemingly with an interest in the vernacular Bible of the Anglo-Saxon period as L'Isle was. But Laud was running afoul of Parliament: by this time we're fast approaching Cromwell and Milton et al, both of whom are already active. If memory serves Laud, sensing trouble brewing, made two large manuscript bequests to Oxford in 1641-2, including this manuscript. And that's how a Cottonian manuscript came to Oxford and escaped the Ashburnham House fire of 1731.

In full disclosure, the foregoing is not the result of my original research. It is a summary of what is found in Neil Ker's Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon and Graham, Timothy. “Early Modern Users of Claudius B.Iv: Robert Talbot and William L’Isle.” In The Old English Hexateuch: Aspects and Approaches, ed. Rebecca Barnhouse and Benjamin C. Withers. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000. For more, I write about this manuscript in chapter 3 of the ol' beast.

Today, Post 1

I do have a couple of posts hanging out there like chads that I aim to complete someday soonish and then move on to the next Medieval Literature I Didn't Know piece, the one that inspired the series in fact, and will go well with Dr. Nokes' monster class if I get it translated for him so he can use it in class which most likely won't happen.

Ok, long breath....24 hours away from becoming, after a 25 year journey, Dr. Larry Swain.

Blogroll

Everyone has a blogroll. At a prompt from Steven Till, I'm updating mine at long last. My principal for this update is: I'm not including other blogs I post to, I'll put those up in the title. And these are blogs *I* currently read with regularity and that have postings that may be read with regularity....interesting blogs I check but that haven't had a posting in a year or 6 months aren't included. It will take me awhile, perhaps a couple weeks to complete this as the roll is long and I've been having trouble getting them all in without the window to Blogger shutting down, so I'm now doing it piecemeal. If you don't see yours, send me a note and I'll add it to the list. (Oh, I've also excluded blogs by other Heroic Age board members, I'll highlight those over on the HA blog.

Naked Philologists

NP shared this on her blog and I thought it was too good not to pass on in case you missed it: http://nakedphilologist.wordpress.com/2008/10/07/proffessorial-quote-of-the-day/

Readyish to Share

Well, I have a defense date. Oct 24 I go before a board of 5 and defend my work. I'm more nervous about the editing than I am about the content.

Still, it isn't done. I just want to graduate and get a job someday. There's much yet to do on the work. But I thought I'd share for those who might possibly want to read it (ok, that's you Mom, but you should probably wait for the hardback).

Its here.

Undoubtedly between now and the defense I'll tweak it more, and after the defense I'll tweak it more, and after I know where I'm going there'll be significant changes to move it into a book. But there it is.

Norman Conquest

I know I'm a bit behind here, but I wanted to wish everyone a Happy Norman Invasion Day! On this date in 1066, Billy the Conker, as 1066 And All That calls him, began the invasion of England. Sept. 27

Canon

I'm returning to the other end of my academic interests for this post. I've recently completed reading Phillip Davies Scribes and Schools, first published in 1998. This shows that I'm only about ten years behind on my reading. This post is mostly about Second Temple Judaism and ancient scribal activity, but there is some medieval content toward the end.


Anyway, its a great, and I think overlooked, volume. The premise is that when discussing the canonization of the collection we know as the Hebrew Bible, we ought to look to scribal schools and activities. The Hebrew Bible is less a "religious" text than a cultural text composed, collected, codified, and canonized by scribes. The processes at work are social processes that are only in part religious. These processes are further the same processes we see in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Hellenistic world. YES! The only other person whom I know to have discussed the development of the biblical canon from this perspective has been Nahum Sarna in a pamphlet he did for Library of Congress in which he points to these same processes at work.

There are various models of canonical development that Davies critiques. He rejects the models that do not adequately place the canonical of Jewish texts in a cultural mileau of the Ancient Near East. He rejects models that suggest that the canon, or perhaps multiple canons, arose to address and resolve conflicts in the community. In my view, this is absolutely correct. While there were certainly conflicts only a few of which we are able to discern in the text, canonization is seldom a process that is designed to paper over such differences. Individual texts may be removed or added to a preexisting canon to resolve such conflicts, but the canonizing process really has nothing to do with community conflicts as a whole. Davies also takes to task Michael Fishbane, who also sees the canonizing process as taking a long time and in scribal activities, but offers no certain rationale. In my mind, this is true as well, and what's more, for some reason not quite adequately explained in his writings, Fishbane rejects the notion of a pre-rabbinic canon. Related, Davies also rejects, rightly I think, that the texts of the Hebrew Bible were written to be canon...i. e. the canonical process and the composition process are one and the same. This might be true of some of the later material, such as Daniel, but as a whole can not be sustained, and so far as I know would be a unique situation in canonical history. Davies comes to a similar conclusion in that he points out that the composition of some books can not have been intended as canon (Song of Solomon for example), nor does Davies see how an author could develop the canonical clout so to speak to have a writing accepted. He also takes on James Sanders and Brevard Childs. These two are who got me interested in the question of canon in the first place, but one of the questions and issues here is that they look at the end product and talk about reception and canon communities. This is important, but has little place in a discussion of the processes of canonization; both tend to be rather too theological as well.

Davies argues, erroneously I think, that the canonization process can not have begun in the monarchical period (c. 1050-585 BCE), and so he points to the Persian period as the point of departure in the process. He further argues that for the prophets, the idea of a true vs. false prophet is not the major motivating factor. And before I forget I should toss in here that scribes serve power structures, and thus their canonizing activities have to be seen in relationship to those power structures.

There are places where I strongly disagree with Davies. He's a minimalist, I'm not. Considering scribal activity in the cultural mileau during the monarchical period, canonizing undoubtedly occurred then....whether that activity has much bearing on activity after the Exile is a different question.

When we get to the rabbis, Davies does not go nearly far enough in his critique of taking the phrase "to make the hands unclean" as indication of canonicity. It has for long been thought that rabbinic discussions on whether a particular scroll containing a literary work, particularly a literary work that belongs in what we know of as the Hebrew Bible, expressed as whether or not it "makes the hands unclean" indicates whether or not the rabbis were debating its canonical status.

They weren't. The tractate of the Mishnah in which the phrase occurs is Yadaim, "hands", and its subject matter by and large is ritual purity as it pertains to, well, the hands. Thus a black pot on an open fire makes the hands unclean. Heave offerings in the Temple violated by mice make the hands unclean. The only books that get mentioned are those pertaining to the Bible.

The issue, even with the books, is ritual purity: what and in what conditions do certain objects impute impurity that must then be purified. Thus, the scrolls containing what we call Scripture impute impurity according to the Mishnah only when written on leather (parchment), in Assyrian square script, in Hebrew. Any translations do not so impart impurity under any conditions. In short, only the scrolls written in a deluxe manner, any other manner (on papyrus in a different script or a different language) need not apply. Now if we press this into service as an indicator of canonicity we run into the problem the Psalms for instance are only canonical if written on leather in Assyrian square script in Hebrew: but not if written on papyrus in Hebrew in Assyrian square script. ANd it should be obvious that that is NOT how canon, canons, and canonical processes work.

Davies notes that the phrase refers to holiness and leaves the question there really, not going far enough to point out the error of our ways. Nor does he point out that talking about canonizing processes producing a "final" canon never really produce a "final" canon. Any canon that is considered closed may be reopened by future generations, particularly generations like the rabbis who are picking up the pieces after a major cultural upheaval.

Davies does point out toward the end of the discussion but misses the import of the fact that modern Christianity does not have a closed canon of its Bible(s). There are at least 3 major recensions, and each of those has minor differences depending on the body of people one is referring to. Nor does he point out that "lists of books" as a final product are no sure measure of canonicity either or of closure: again taking Christianity as an example, the first such list that had any widespread authority, rather than local authority, was the Council of Trent in 1550.

Others who reviewed the book have pointed out other problems. For example, Davies thinks that the canonizing process in the Persian period started because that's when the texts were first written; but the problem there is that some of the texts contain references to a social situation that no longer pertains to fifth century Jerusalem and that the writers of that period never knew. Others point to studies of scribal activity in Mesopotamia and cast doubt on whether we have sure evidence of canonizing processes there, the evidence is unclear. These are just examples.

All in all however, I thought the book a good one and many of the problems could have been resolved with simply a longer volume, but then it couldn't have been in this series. And it must be remembered that canonizing processes, and the final product, a literary canon, takes place within the context of scribal activity.

And this is true in the medieval period as well. We too seldom talk about the literary canons and canonizing processes in the medieval period; it goes beyond mere availability. There are the works that any educated person was expected to know, there's Alfred's canon, there's the entire process of what was read by medieval authors and why, the canon of Aelfric's works (and how and why such works were often divorced from their authors), and of course the invention of authority in a new work imitating a canonical one. We often hint around these issues. We have talked about them to a degree (Stock's Listening to the Text, Martin Irvine, etc) and talked about scribal culture and scribal activity. But not really, unless I'm missing something, in terms of canonical and the canonical process. Maybe its time we did.

What is of interest to me though is that to a degree there's a stream of scribal tradition, some part of which is canonical process, some part of which is dipolmatic in nature, some part of which is literary or theological or philosophical in nature, that can be traced from the invention of writing all the way to the present. We still participate in that scribal tradition, those of us in the Humanities in modern academia (and others). Even in the post-cultural wars period, we've invented new canons, not really done away with them--anyone may check the anthologies for literature classes to confirm that! Anyway, along the same lines what interests me too is that what we see in the medieval period is something akin to the Rabbinic problem: recreating a culture out of the past inheritance and the present. And it is interesting what they chose (hence at least in Anglo-Saxon studies we have the Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture project and Fontes Anglo-Saxonici both of which examine Anglo-Saxon literary borrowings of the past. I don't know of like projects for other fields.) But this is getting me into the subject of another post....to conclude this one, scribal tradition and the accompanying canonical processes are an ever-flowing stream worthy of our study as we too continue the processes. I have to go fix dinner now, so a good stop to finish. As Garrison Keilor says, "Be Well. Do Good Work. Stay in touch."

A tidbit...

Whilst I prepare another longish post instead of doing other work like editing, I thought I'd share this jewel. A friend sent this to my wife who naturally sent this to me. I have no idea what its original source is or whether I'm violating copyright, but its priceless.