INTRODUCTION

The relevance of classical education to women was very much a subject of debate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There is an enormous literature concerned with the proper extent of female learning, much of it in the form of lists, or catalogues, of learned women (to be discussed later in this chapter). Clearly, many were against it: equally clearly, many educators, both male and female, spoke in favour of educating girls, and a good few actually did so. My chapter will attempt to focus on both the debate itself, and its social and cultural consequences.

What complicates this subject is the enormous mass of evidence more or less indirectly about educated women, compared with the small quantity of actual surviving works by women. This means that, even today, discussions of women's opportunities and achievements tend to consist of the bandying about of secondary authorities. The same few names, linked by phrases such as ‘is said by contemporaries to…’ appear all too often. Male defenders of women's education have in effect intruded themselves as spokesmen for early modern women rather than allowing them to speak for themselves, a situation not without its parallels among more recent male feminists.

I should perhaps describe my practice in quoting from primary sources. Where the original is in Latin or Greek, I quote the original (with translation). Where the source-text was written (or survives) in Syriac, Armenian, Irish or another language, I quote only the translation. In a case where, for example, the original Greek of Theodore of Mopsuestia survives only in Syriac, and is translated by its editor into French, I quote the French translation rather than risk further distortion, since I am regrettably unable to judge whether the French accurately represents the Syriac. In some cases, a Syriac original is represented by a modern Latin translation. When the Latin translation is itself early medieval, I will endeavour to make this clear. Page-references to Malalas's Chronographia throughout are to Dindorf's edition, since this has been taken as a standard by von Stauffenberg, the PG text and the Jeffreys translation, all of which print Dindorf's pagination in the margin.

1 Christe, faue uotis bonis. This opening invocation is possibly a significant feature of the Laterculus. The Christe faue formula is not all that common. Victor, the bishop of Capua, entered XF in the Codex Fuldensis (CLA VIII, no. 1196, a sixth-century uncial gospelbook, which may just possibly have been in England, since it was used by Boniface).

It is both a duty and a pleasure to thank the various people who have given generously of their time in reading and commenting on my various drafts. Henry Chadwick, Michael Lapidge, Dáibhí Ó Cróiníh, Elizabeth Jeffreys, Andy Orchard, Winifred Temple, Neil Wright, David Dumville and Richard Sharpe have all been extremely helpful. Lesley Abrams and Simon Keynes both answered queries about charters, for which I am most grateful. Michael Lapidge collated the Vatican manuscript on my behalf, and also allowed me to use his Biblical Commentaries pre-publication. I owe a particular debt to David Dumville, for his generous loan of his complete set of photographs of the Vatican MS of the Laterculus, which formed the basis of my edition. I would also like to thank Carmela Vircillo Franklin for giving me xeroxes of her edition and commentary on the Passio S. Anastasii, and Elizabeth Jeffreys for sending me most of the Studies volume months before it came out. Peter Davidson performed the traditional duties of an academic spouse by checking references in the final stages. Earlier versions of the main arguments in the Introduction were presented as papers to the Cambridge Classics Faculty seminar on the transmission of Latin texts in the Middle Ages, and the seminar which was held in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic to mark the 1300th anniversary of the death of Archbishop Theodore in 1990. I am indebted to participants at both these occasions for illuminating comments and helpful information.

The Leiden manuscript is entirely dependent on the Vatican one, as I will seek to demonstrate in ch. 8, Its more correct Latin, therefore, is not in any sense independent, but is an attempt by the Carolingian scribe to tidy up the more obvious errors in his exemplar. Accordingly, the entire discussion of the author's Latinity relates to the text as presented by Pal. lat. 277.

ORTHOGRAPHY

The orthography of the Vatican text of the Laterculus is on the whole fairly correct. There are no vulgarisms like syncope or prosthetic vowels. The scribe, writing in an Italian hand in the early eighth century, presumably Italian himself, may well have contributed an additional level of error. The other texts copied in this codex are also carelessly written in this sense, and Lowe noted the presence of Late Latin spellings such as storia for historia, Spania for Hispania, consistent confusion of e and i, o and u and b and v, and irregular aspiration in the manuscript as a whole. The Latinity of another work in Pal. lat. 277, the Irish Questiones sancti Isidori, came under the scrutiny of Robert McNally. He found that both consonantal and vocalic orthography wandered from the Classical norm in very much the same way as the Laterculus, and does not seem to have found the orthographic ‘Irish symptoms’, such as the conspicuous misuse of single and geminate consonants.