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The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

A Medieval Nun, Writing

by Martha G. Newman

On a research trip last summer, I found a previously unidentified thirteenth-century manuscript in a library in Poznan, Poland, and recognized that it contains the writings of a late twelfth-century monk named Engelhard of Langheim. One of the Latin texts in this manuscript is the saintly biography of a religious woman named Mechtilde of Diessen. The following story, found only in this one Polish manuscript, appears as a postscript:

Saint Mechtilde, as was said earlier, was in the habit of writing.  She did so to avoid eating the bread of leisure, and in this especially she believed she greatly pleased her God.  She frequently brooded like a mother hen over the writing of missals and psalters because she thought – or rather she hoped – to serve the divine more earnestly in doing this.  Her hope did not betray her.  For one day, when she still had work remaining, she wished to repair a blunt pen, but she did not succeed.  The pen was very troublesome to prepare.  She was knowledgeable about cutting quills, but once cut, this quill did not respond when tested.  This caused in her not a little disturbance of her spirit.  “Oh,” she said, “if God would only send me his messenger, who could prepare this pen for me, for I have rarely suffered this difficulty, and it is now greatly troubling me.”   As soon as she said this, a youth appeared.  He had a beautiful face, a shining robe, and sweet speech.  He said, “What troubles you, O beloved?”  And she said, “I spend my time uselessly, I toil for nothing, and I do not know how to prepare my pen.”   He said, “Give it to me, and perhaps you will not be hindered anymore by this knowledge when you wish to prepare it.”  She gave it to him, and he prepared it in such a way that it remained satisfactory for her until her death: she wrote with it for the many years that she lived.  After this miracle, when she spent time writing, no one could write so well, no one so quickly, no one so readily, and no one so correctly, nor could anyone imitate in likeness her hand.  The pen’s preparation, as I said, was permanent, but the preparer disappeared and appeared in the work of which he was the maker.  I have reported this just as the daughter of the duke of Merania, herself a holy virgin, has testified.  She, reading this little work on the life of Mechtilde, asked to add what was missing.[1]

This brief little anecdote tells us a great deal about the literacy of medieval nuns.  First, it reminds us that nuns as well as monks copied manuscripts.   In recent years, our understanding of medieval literacy has become more nuanced. Scholars have separated the ability to read, to write, and to compose texts into discrete aspects of what we now call “literacy.”  We know that many nuns and many aristocratic women could read:  noble women in the later middle ages commissioned elaborate prayer books called Books of Hours, mothers were pictured reading to their daughters, and convents sometimes had extensive libraries.   We also know women composed texts, but they often did so with the cooperation of male scribes who wrote down what the women dictated.  Female scribes, however, are hard to locate. Scribes did not always sign their names to their work, and women may have been particularly reticent to do so.   But we are beginning to realize that writing was a form of work for nuns as well as for monks and that, at times, religious men and women even worked together to produce manuscripts.   Monks also sent drafts of their compositions to nuns to be copied.  As one twelfth-century monk told the abbess of a convent, “having no scribe at my disposal, as you can see by the irregular formation of the letters, I wrote this book with my own hand.” As a result, he asked to have his text  “copied legibly and carefully corrected by some of your sisters trained for this kind of work.”[2]

512px-Christine_de_pisanThis is a 15th century image of Christine de Pisan (1363 – c. 1430), one of the best known authors of medieval Europe.  She is shown writing her own book, but she is using the same tools that Mechtilde would have employed: she has a pen in one hand and a scraper in the other

Mechtilde probably did not copy texts that she herself composed.  The story depicts writing as a form of spiritual labor that prevented a dangerous leisure:  Mechtilde’s irritation that she wasted her time trying to fix her pen demonstrates her concern for purposeful work.  But the content of the books still mattered.

A second interesting element of this story is that Mechtilde associated her careful copying of missals and psalters with serving God, a phrase more frequently used to describe the prayers and rituals that these texts depicted.  The Psalms formed the fundamental prayers for monks and nuns; in praying six times a day and once at night, monks and nuns sang the entire psalter every week and repeated some Psalms daily.  By copying psalters, Mechtilde could pray while she wrote.  Copying missals, however, had a different implication, for the missal was the liturgical book for the mass.  Mechtilde could not perform the mass, but the story suggests a parallel between her writing and the actions of a priest.  Although Mechtilde asked God to send his messenger to assist her, the young man’s appearance and his reference to Mechtilde as his “beloved” suggest that he was Jesus.  Just as a priest, using the prayers and instructions laid out in a missal, transformed the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, so Mechtilde, in copying missals with devotion, filled those books with the presence of Jesus: “he appeared in her work of which he was the maker.” As a woman, Mechtilde was unable to serve at the altar, but she had found another way to participate in the performance of the mass.

Finally, the transmission of the story is noteworthy.  The author of Mechtilde’s life, the monk Engelhard of Langheim, never met Mechtilde, but he knew members of her family: they were important patrons of his monastery. In the saint’s life, Engelhard had mentioned briefly that Mechtilde was a scribe but he did so only to emphasize her willing obedience to put down her pen immediately when summoned. He learned the story about the pen from Mechtilde’s niece.  The niece, a daughter of a duke, was also a nun, and she placed more emphasis on her aunt’s writing.  Her memories of her aunt suggest that in the middle ages, as today, family histories were often the preserve of women and that tales were often recounted orally from one generation to the next.  The niece’s story, as Engelhard recorded it, gives us a brief glimpse into the family legends of this one aristocratic lineage.

You may also enjoy

Martha G. Newman, A Medieval Vision 

For more information on women as scribes and as readers, see

Alison Beach, Women as Scribes:  Book Production and Monastic Reform in Twelfth-Century Bavaria (2004)

David N. Bell, What Nuns Read;  Books and Libraries in Medieval English Nunneries (1995)

[1] Engelhard of Langheim, “De eo quod angelus ei pennan temperavit.”  Posnan, Biblioteka Raczynskich. Rkp156, 117r-v.

[2] “A Dialogue between a Cluniac and a Cistercian” in Cistercians and Cluniacs:  The Case for Cîteaux, trans.  Jeremiah F. O’Sullivan (Kalamazoo:  Cistercian Publications, 1977), p. 22.

Photo Credit: Christine de Pisan, Wikimedia Commons

Black Loyalists and “The Book of Negroes”

by Cassandra Pybus

The Book of Negroes is an extraordinary historical resource, a meticulous list drawn up by the British authorities between May and November 1783, in which they recorded the personal details of some 3,000 African Americans evacuated from New York. The great majority of these people were originally enslaved workers who had defected to the British and were now leaving America as free people. The most significant thing about the Book of Negroes is that most people are recorded with surnames that allow them to be tracked through the archives. It is organized by ship with each person given a name, in many cases with a surname, age, brief description, owner’s name, date of absconding, geographic location and, where appropriate, the name of a loyalist sponsor. Even though the surnames of listed individuals are often misheard, the ages are wildly inaccurate and the time of absconding is ambiguous, we simply don’t have demographic data like this about enslaved people in the eighteenth century in any other source.

In addition to the Book of Negroes, a related resource is the muster of black settlers at Birchtown 1783/1784, which was created by the British authorities for the purposes of distributing rations at the biggest black settlement in Nova Scotia. This list provides first names and surnames, ages and sometimes occupations and, crucially, it is organized by households with the names and ages of wives, children and other household members. In addition, the British archives yield other lists of black refugees including Revolutionary musters, land grant schedules in Nova Scotia; Nova Scotia parish records of the settlements of Birchtown, Digby and Annapolis and lists of people migrating to Sierra Leone. These are all partial lists and frustratingly opaque, but they all provide surnames and some demographic information.

In order to interpret the data and unlock the meanings and implications of the vital demographic information contained in the Book of Negroes and other British sources, the data on each person needs to be read against American colonial sources such as lists of tithable slave property, minutes of county Committees of Safety, runaway notices, parish vestry books, wills and probate records, letters and diaries of prominent individuals, petitions to government, shipping records, plantation records, court records, and county militia records. The seemingly impossible task of locating individuals and their kin is made viable for the largest single cohort from the Lower Chesapeake region of Virginia.  By a stroke of luck the Norfolk Tithable lists from 1730 to 1780 survive largely intact and these provide a single name for slave property, aged between 16 years and 60 years, belonging to heads of households in Norfolk County.

By meticulous cross referencing the information in the Book of Negroes and other British sources I have been able to construct life trajectories, kin relationships, naming patterns and religious affiliations for hundreds of people. These biographies form the first phase of the website Black Loyalist, a repository of historical data about the African American loyalist refugees whose names are recorded in the Book of Negroes

A passport for Cato Ramsay to emigrate to Nova Scotia in 1783. Black refugees behind British lines needed passports to leave the United States. Without this document, they risked a return to their place of origin, which meant a return to enslavement. Source: Nova Scotia Archives

Here is brief sketch of one individual: 

James Jackson is said to be fifty years old in the Book of Negroes and described as “Formerly slave to late Robert Tucker, Norfolk, Virginia; left him with Lord Dunmore when he left that country & was employed as a pilot.” In 1775 his owner was the Norfolk merchant and mariner Robert Tucker Jr, and he was inherited from Colonel Robert Tucker, whose extensive estate was mostly sold after his death in 1767. He must have defected to Lord Dunmore sometime between June and November 1775 when Lord Dunmore had taken refuge on a British warship in the James River, just offshore from Norfolk.

Years later the widow to Robert Tucker Jr lodged a claim for property lost to the British at the burning of Norfolk in December 1775 and during the British occupation of the spit of land known as Tucker’s Mill Point in April 1776. The property list includes the names of nine enslaved men, two women and a boy but does not list James, who is appeared in Tucker’s tithables in 1774. This evidence strongly implies that, like several other pilots, James Jackson had defected to Dunmore earlier in the conflict.

During the revolution James Jackson worked as a pilot for the Royal Navy and in 1783 he travelled to Nova Scotia in the company of Captain Henry Mowatt, commander of HMS La Sophia. Travelling with him was another pilot named London Jackson, aged 32, who was apparently his brother and was described as “Formerly slave to William Ballad, Hampton, Virginia; left him two years past.” According to the Norfolk Tithables, London’s owners were Daniel Barraud and his son William, merchants in Norfolk and Hampton, who had close business and kin connections to Robert Tucker. He would have have defected to General Leslie who made a foray into Hampton in 1781. The Jackson brothers did not go to Birchtown but were given a land grant on nearby Nutt Island where they settled with their respective families.

474px-4thEarlOfDunmore
John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, depicted in 1765 by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Dunmore’s Proclamation of 1775 offered freedom to American slaves who joined the Loyalist cause.

Also travelling with London and James Jackson is a woman named Nelly Jackson, aged 33, said to be “Formerly slave to Hampstead Bailie, Hampton, Virginia; left him two years past.” She appears to have run away with London Jackson, but there is no apparent connection between their owners to suggest a kinship connection, and she does not settle at Nutt Island or Birchtown. It is most likely that Nelly was actually the wife of John Jackson who was travelling on the Clinton, which sailed some months later. He was said to be 26 and described as “Formerly the property of Anthony Walk, Princess Ann, Virginia left him 3 years ago.”  He must have run to the British forces of General Leslie in late 1780 at the same time as London Jackson; there is a difference in the stated time they ran because of John Jackson’s later departure from New York. He settled at Birchtown where he was said to be 41, with his wife Nancy, aged 32, whom I believe to be the same woman as Nelly Jackson. Johnny can be found in the Tucker Tithables 1765 and in Tucker’s estate in 1768 and listed with Tucker’s widow until 1774. After Mrs Tucker’s death in 1779 he must have been sold to Anthony Walke, who lived in Princess Anne County Norfolk, who also had a mercantile business in Norfolk with connections to Tucker.

The strong circumstantial evidence — close connections between their owners, their shared occupation, the times and places at which they defected—lead me to conclude that these Jackson men are all from one family. There was no reason for me to presume a connection between this family and several other Jacksons from Norfolk who settle at Birchtown. Then I made the chance discovery of a land transfer deed for the Nutt Island grant that states that Jane Thompson was the mother of James Jackson and by extension the mother of London and John.

Jane Thomson was said to be aged 70 and worn out. The Book of Negroes indicates that she was travelling with a five-year-old grandchild and that she  “Says she was born free; lived with Col. Tucker, Norfolk, Virginia; left him 6 years ago.” Jane Thompson is one of the oldest members of the cohort of Black Loyalists from Virginia evacuated to Nova Scotia. At Birchtown she is living with Hannah Jackson and two grandchildren, Robert and Peter Jackson. Close examination of the opaque and fragmentary documentary record about Jane Thompson in colonial Virginia reveals an extraordinary narrative of determination and family resilience.

For more on the Book of Negroes, the Black Loyalists, and the historical recovery of the lives of African American slaves, see the website Black Loyalist: http://www.blackloyalist.info

And Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty

Images via Wikimedia Commons.

Beseiged: Voices from Delhi 1857 by Mahmood Farooqui (2010)

by Isabel Huacuja

During the summer of 1857, Indian rebel soldiers from the British Army attempted to overthrow the British hold on India and reinstall Mughal rule.  For five months, rebels seized Delhi and declared the aged Mughal noble, Bahadur Shah Zafar, Emperor of India. Referred to as the 1857 Mutiny by British rulers and as the First War of Independence by enthusiastic nationalists, few events in Indian history incite more passion than the 1857 seige of Delhi. image In Besieged: Voices from Delhi 1857, Mahmood Farooqui draws on more than ten thousand Urdu and Persian documents processed by the rebel administration and later used by the British as evidence in Bahadur Shah Zafar’s trial. As Farooqui notes in the introduction, despite the widespread availability of histories, memoires, and essays on the 1857 uprising, we know much about the British experience and remarkably little about what went on within the walls of the seized city. The documents in this collection show how the rebel government administered the city and how the uprising affected ordinary people.

One man asks the rebel government to release his dhobie (washerman) from prison because the dhobie has all the man’s clothing and he has nothing left to wear.  A widow asks for financial compensation because rebel soldiers killed her husband and stole all her belongings. Farooqui presents grievances from soldiers who had not been paid, letters from ordinary citizens complaining about harassment by rebel soldiers, documents describing elopements, evictions, burglaries, bail proceedings, gambling, and counterfeit currency. Food was scarce and looting widespread. The city’s sanitation system broke-down and corpses and animal carcasses lay on the streets untouched for months.  The documents recount “the unsung, the ordinary, and the unheroic” of 1857.

A few themes run through the selected documents and cannot fail to capture the imagination. First, anti-British sentiments were widespread.  Regardless of how the English may have thought of themselves, to the natives, they were “trespassers.” Second, the uprising enjoyed a wide base of support; doctors and lawyers joined the cause along with soldiers and civilians. Third, religion played a role in the uprising as anti-Christian rhetoric was widespread, but, as the translator reminds us, not everybody was affected by “religious fervor.” Fourth, while chaos certainly prevailed in Delhi in 1857, the historiography overemphasizes disorder and confusion and almost completely overlooks attempts at order and organization. In the author’s opinion, the mere existence of an archive produced by and for the rebel government shows “there was some order, organization and method to the outward chaos.”

The papers collected in that archive and presented in this book serve to record a time of turmoil and provide a bird’s eye view of everyday life during a very complicated and multifaceted event.

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