That's Numberwang! On Quant Methods and Medieval Manuscripts.

When I lived in the UK I watched a lot of Mitchell and Webb. A British comedy duo who should be more famous among Americans than they are, they made sketches just the side of absurd where—unlike Monty Python—things never devolved into the annoyingly silly (or racist). They did a recurring sketch which, signature Mitchell and Webb, sent up both the subject of the sketch as well as the other comedy shows that sent up the topic in the past: the network television game show.

This is Numberwang, and it is one of my favorite things. 

The sketch features two contestants who alternate calling out arbitrary numbers until the host—Robert Webb as Chuck Woolery on uppers—calls out “That’s Numberwang!” before a new round of random number-calling begins. The comedy of the sketch relies on the two contestants, fully committing with studied gravity to the nonexistent logic of the game. Robert Webb’s sunny excitement as he rewards the correct number is the punctuation that pitches its absurdity into the comic.

Numberwang came to my mind when I read the most recent medieval manuscripts study making ripples online because of its promotion in Nature—this is a semi-regular event when medieval studies gets invited to the beach by science and enjoys a moment in the sun. 

The study ensues from a simple question. It asks: “What was the quantitative contribution of female scribes [to the production of manuscripts in Europe between 800 and 1600 CE] based on available sources? How large was the fraction of the manuscripts copied by women?” After citing some of the  historical research that has examined the work of female scribes in the Middle Ages the authors refer to the target of their research (how many were there?) as a “gap in the knowledge.” Strictly speaking, yes this is a gap in our knowledge: nobody knows know how many female scribes there were working in Europe between these years, nor do we do how many manuscripts they produced. But we don’t know how many male scribes were working during this period either, and when you put it like that it seems like a strange question to ask. 

This isn’t to say that quantitative analysis shouldn’t be done or can’t be useful. Looking at a narrow window of time in England and using financial records detailing the amount of wax that chancery scribes paid for as the basis for extrapolating how many sealed documents issued from the office of chancery per day: this strikes me as a really clever use of quantitative analysis based on pretty firm foundations (and it’s why Michael Clanchy had the well-deserved vaunted reputation he had).

But historical research is fun like this, and we can ask whatever questions we want even if skeptics like me can’t see the value of the question asked. If I had my druthers, I’d follow the lead of Linda Nochlin: I wouldn’t try to collect a full deck of female scribes to prove their place in history, inevitably coming up short; I’d inquire into the institutional conditions that impeded their access to the opportunities enjoyed by men, or I’d wonder about the nature of their training and how it differed from the educations afforded to their male counterparts; I’d ask about the criteria for success, who got to dictate that criteria, and whether elements of it were framed specifically to place the goalposts beyond what women’s training could reach.

Nevertheless, the authors are in search of numbers. So they approach an answer to their question by using what they call “bibliometric analysis” based on the data provided from colophons as contained in the multivolume Colophons de manuscrits occidentaux des origines au XVI e siècle compiled by the Benedictines of Bouveret between 1965 and 1982.

By definition, a colophon is a statement made within a book which contains details about the production of the book in which it’s found (this information could run the gamut from containing the names of everyone involved in the book’s production to the date and place of the book’s completion, alongside complaints by the scribe about what a long boring task it was; other colophons might only offer a date or a place or a single name). Colophons are notoriously cagey forms of historical evidence: sometimes scribes copied them verbatim from their exemplars (the books they were copying), and this even occurred when scribes copied by hand printed books. It’s very fun finding a manuscript that announces in  handwritten ink where it was printed. Moreover, the impetus to include a colophon was often not present, and swathes of manuscripts produced in the Middle Ages (most of them, in fact) contain no such information at all. So they’re an imperfect guide to the subject of scribes’ identities and their labor output to begin with.

But as the authors of this paper themselves acknowledge—and they are scrupulous about outlining many of the weaknesses of this dataset—the six volumes of colophons compiled by the Benedictines of Bouveret are even less reliable than the colophons they record (and there are, further, unknown historical variables that resulted in a disproportionately higher survival rate of manuscripts produced by men). Reviews of the volumes consistently refer to their inaccuracies, their gaps, and in the words of one scholar who reviewed the final volume and summarized how the entire set should be approached, “caveat lector.”

So this is the dataset from which the authors proceed, and after counting up all the 254 colophons that identify a female scribe (1.1% of the 23,774 colophons in the catalogue), they extrapolate this percentage to some other extrapolation of all the manuscripts that might have been produced between 800 and 1600, based on an estmation of loss rates (a notoriously uncertain conjecture, and, again, the authors note this). They calculate 110,000, of “which at least 8000 should still exist.” 

The authors refer to their work as a “first step,” but the questions to which they point don’t ensue from their conclusions. They suggest that scholars might attempt to identify as-yet unknown communities of female scribes from historical records or they might consider”socio-political and socio-economic links to literacy, throwing light on when, why and how women worked as scribes during specific time periods.” These are questions that historians have already, for a long while, been asking. The “big picture” provided by the present study, built on a foundation of extremely partial and often incorrect data, is not actually a first step towards any of this.

I admit I’m not sure what the aim of this paper was given that the guiding question is not answerable based on the data or methods used to approach it. The project was supported by the Trond Mohn Research Foundation, which awards grants “to support research at the interface between basic research and clinical research at the University of Bergen and Haukeland University Hospital.” This is all very much above board: a foundation has money to offer research that involves scholars in clinical research, and that’s exactly what the authors of this paper did. I wonder, though, whether the existence of the grant was the impetus here. And if that’s the case, then molding a project to satisfy its conditions engendered the results the usefulness of which the authors do not articulate. 

But now we have a piece circulating the number that 1.1% of manuscripts were produced by female scribes, which might have once amounted to 110,000 books, 8,000 of which might still be around.

That’s Numberwang!

From Jewish Badges in 1218 to Technofascism in 2025

A short book I’m writing with the somewhat forbidding title, Book History Is Not the History of the Book: Four Essays from Fifteenth-Century England, is founded on the simple premise that the traditional, linear formulas that have structured the field of book history (from orality to literacy, from roll to codex, from manuscript to print, and from print to digital) represent a technologically deterministic and teleological view that belies the complexities of the history of the book.

The introduction to this book takes as its starting point the moment when the idea that “the book” has a history came to be codified, politicized, and racialized in thirteenth-century England. It is, as I argue, no coincidence that in this moment, Europe’s first mandates to visibly tag a minority population was first enacted by law and that the form of that badge was what was seen as an obsolete technology—namely, the tablets of the Ten Commandments.

Publication pipelines are long (and I’m trying to finish another book first!), and scholarship demands patience that is often ill-suited to the urgencies of the moment. So I post here the introduction and the conclusion to the essay that opens my book.

INTRODUCTION TO BOOK HISTORY IS NOT THE HISTORY OF BOOKS

In May of 2024, Apple aired a commercial that aspired to showcase the revolutionary power of their latest gadget by crushing within the gargantuan plates of an industrial press the implements and artifacts of creative culture: a trumpet, an arcade game, cans of paint, a piano with sheet music, a metronome, a sculpted bust in clay, cameras, a television, a guitar, notebooks, and bizarrely a toy emoji. And when that press releases its clench, all that remains on its bed is an antiseptic tablet, vapid in its gleaming sterility. It is a violent declaration of techno-utopian independence, convinced of the creativity of its own destruction. It is no wonder the ad was unanimously reviled and retracted; no wonder, because it lays bare in celebratory tones the technochauvinist vision that is a hallmark of our age. This is the legacy of uncritical arguments about the liberating novelty of the press to supersede the bounding conditions of history, the springboard required to launch humanity out of the Middle Ages into modernity.

While arguments against the role assigned to the printing press in birthing western liberal democracy have been voiced for a long time now, these criticisms tend not to take into account the broader historiographical model on which this idea is premised: specifically, a Christological paradigm of book history. This is a supersessionist one with Pauline origins that periodizes the history of the book into four phases: from orality to literacy; from scroll to codex; from manuscript to print; from print to digital. In what follows, I want to hone in on one important moment in this history when arguments about the obsolescence of certain textual technologies were yoked to Jews, forever racializing the history of the book. In her 2019 monograph, Race after Technology Ruha Benjamin implored us to scrutinize the kinds of assumptions that underwrote Apple's ad, asking "what is hidden by an idealistic vision of technology. How is technology already raced?” For Benjamin that means interrogating the racist assumptions written into modern computer technology. But long before those assumptions were inextricably woven into code, it was the codex itself that encoded hegemonic ideals. The case that I'll be making is that a landmark instance of the racing of the book as technology occurred in England between 1218 and 1290 and that the impact of this racing continues to be felt today.

[…. my essay then recounts the history of the Jewish badges, why the shape of the Ten Commandments was chosen, and the ideological legacies of this history]

CONCLUSION

Supersession, replacement, a progressive movement away from the material: these ideas are so entrenched in conventional book history, are so naturalized that it has been impossible both to see its Christological origins and orientation and to comprehend the narratives that it continues to underwrite. I have often told people that I am a medievalist for the same reason that I read dystopian novels: nothing makes me think better than to see my own world reflected back at me with enough difference to make me question that which I take for granted. In Gary Shteyngart's 2010 novel Super Sad True Love Story our protagonists inhabit a near future in which America, on the brink of economic collapse, has only three main industries: media, credit, and retail. The social media website that dominates public discourse has promoted the idea that paper books are, in a word, gross. In one text message to her friend, our narrator Eunice Park describes her budding love interest, the nebbish Lenny Abramov,

Anyway, what kind of freaked me out was that I saw Len reading a book. (No, it didn't SMELL. He uses Pine-Sol on them.) And I don't mean scanning a text like we did in Euro Classics with that Chatterhouse of Parma I mean seriously READING. He had this ruler out and he was moving it down the page very slowly and just like whispering little things to himself, like trying to understand every little part of it.... I thought Ben was really brain-smart because I saw him streaming Chronicles of Narnia in that cafe in Rome, but this Tolstoy was a thousand pages long BOOK, not a stream, and Lenny was on page 930, almost finished.

 Later in the same message to her friend Eunice describes going to Tompkins Square Park where she sees

all these Low Net Worth Individuals there and they're camped out with all their dirty things... and they have all these really old computers they try to boot up but really they have no Images or streams. So after Sally left I ran home and got all my old äppäräti and I gave them out... They were so happy to have my old ghetto stuff that it made me sad because this is what their lives have become and just last year some of them worked in Credit or were engineers.

I was reminded of this novel when I was re-reading Sara Lipton's Images of Intolerance. Speaking more generally of the trope of the Old Law's obsolescence, Lipton points to an aesthetic attached to this idea, writing "In text after text, the Law's obsolescence is attributed not to its honorable expiration or to an orderly passing of the baton but to its own inherent aridity, deformity, and ugliness." There is a violence to casting the obsolete off the page, not unlike the brute force committed by the industrial press crushing the notebooks of the past, all to make way for the shiny, the new, ever striving to reach the immaterial. Long ago Kathleen Biddick argued that "the purported 'secularization' of modernity... has never overtaken this core Christian conception of supersession." What I hope to have shown in capsule form that is state-imposed signs of Jewish identity, mapped on to books and bodies reveal technology's place in this history. If the funding of far right wing figures like J.D. Vance by tech billionaires like Peter Thiel seems perplexing, it is because we have completely forgotten the supersessionism that makes such an unholy alliance ideologically coherent: it is not surprising that when Vance followed Thiel's advice and converted to Catholicism he chose the committed supersessionist Augustine as his patron saint; Thiel's less-subtle approach was to tout Rene Girard's Catholic anthropology and the socially redemptive role of the scapegoat.

The Colophon in the Rüdesheimer Codex of Hildegard von Bingen's Scivias

In the December 2023 issue of Modern Language Quarterly, I published an article that is the first to examine the circumstances surrounding and production of a renowned manuscript facsimile of the Rupertsberg Scivias, the most celebrated copy of the visionary text by Hildegard von Bingen. That manuscript facsimile was copied by three nuns of Eibingen Abbey and illuminated by the artist Josepha Knips between 1927 and 1933. You can access a copy of the article here. Sonja Drimmer, “Hildegard’s Scivias in Weimar Germany: Media Theory by Hand,” Old ‘New Media’ and Literary Studies before 1960, ed. András Kiséry and David Nee, special issue Modern Language Quarterly 84.4 (2023): 443–464.“

My main concern in that article was to take seriously the the 20th-century scribes’ and artist’s labor as articulating a theory about reproduction and mediation by comparing it to an influential debate about the role of replicas and facsimiles in public education (known as the “Hamburg Facsimile Debate”), which took place precisely as these women were producing their facsimile. Despite a paucity of textual material outlining the manuscript producers’ ideas about these subjects, the facsimile itself, I argue, reveals not simply their methods but also the theory guiding these methods—that is, a methodology.

However, there is one extensive textual document that does tell us something alongside the traces of the scribes’ and artist’s work. That document is the colophon inscribed on a final leaf in the facsimile. I discuss this colophon in my article and include a picture of it, but due to the word limit, I was unable to publish my full translation. To my knowledge this colophon has only been reproduced in subsequent facsimiles of the Rüdesheimer facsimile, but nowhere else.

My translation follows immediately below, and I include my transcription of the original Latin below that. If you would like to use it for your work or teaching, cite it as follows: “The Colophon in the Rüdesmeimer Codex of Hildegard von Bingen's Scivias,” translation by Sonja Drimmer. https://sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2024/1/19/the-colophon-in-the-rdesmeimer-codex-of-hildegard-von-bingens-scivias. January 19, 2024.

My thanks to Joy Elisabeth Reeber for reading and offering corrections to my translation.

Colophon. Rüdesheimer Codex. Rüdesheim am Rhein, Abtei St.Hildegard, Hs.1.

TRANSLATION.

This codex contains the most accurate, most true likeness, in both word and picture, of that glorious book, Scivias, which the very Abbess of Rupertsberg at Bingen St Hildegard herself composed and wrote.

This most precious original work held in the sacred building of St-Rupert at Bingen, which was devastasted and destroyed by Swedes in 1632 AD, was deposited in Eibingen monastery. Then after the first building of St-Hildegard of Eibingen was desecrated by secular use in 1804, it was joined to the public library “Aquas Mattiaca” [the Wiesbaden Kurhaus, which bears those words on its entablature over the entrance] where it is kept to this day.

The reverend mistress Regintrudis Sauter, who occupies the thirty-second position as abbess of the monastery at Eibingen after St. Hildegard wanted this excellent work of her own holy fore-mother restored in the first and truest form of the pictures/tablets and letters according to the  exemplum by her very own skilled daughters.

His Majesty Ferdinand, Emperor of Bulgaria, most August Lord, gave the parchment and pigments necessary for accomplishing/completing this work as a gift of the greatest princely munificence and nobility, out of the closeness of his connection to the Reverend Lady Maria Benedicta, a sister of this convent, who was born a duchess of Württemberg and was [then] called/dedicated [to the same].

The ingeniously designed and ornamented binding of this book was made with elegance by hand by craftsmen at the Abbey of Maria Laach, completed by means of the singular, true method in the office of the Herder Verlag in Freibourg.

This most serious work (i.e. copy?) of the original as though [it had been] created and fashioned anew finished within the span of a year and six months to the 25th anniversary of Reverend Mistress Regintrudis Sauter’s Abbacy on the 8th day of September in 1933, the jubilee year of our redemption, celebrated with the highest joy and with most intimate devotion.

This divine work is a gift of God, thanks be to God.

Colophon. Rüdesheimer Codex. Rüdesheim am Rhein, Abtei St.Hildegard, Hs.1.

original text.

Hic codex continet accuratissimam et in verborum contextu et in miniaturis picturisque verissimam imaginem incluti illius libri, quem ipsa Abbatissa monasterii in monte Sancti Ruperti ad Bingum quondam siti Sancta Hildegardis scripsit et inscripsit Scivias.

Pretiosissimum huius operis archetypum sacris aedibus S. Ruperti ad Bingium anno Domini 1632 a Suecis pervastatis atque destructis in monasterium Eibingense delatum est. Unde postquam prius aedificium Sanctae Hildegardis Eibingense ad usum saecularem anno Domini 1804 profanatum est, bibliothecae ad Aquas Mattiacas publice institutae adjiunctum est, ubi adhuc asservatur.

Domna Reverenda Regintrudis Sauter, prima redintegrati monasterii Eibingensis Abbatissa, quae trigesimum secundum post sanctum Hildegardem huius coenobii obtinet locum abbatialem, hoc eximium Sanctae Proavia suae opus in prima verissimaque tabularum litterarumque forma ad exemplum reddi voluit per suas ipsius filias artifices.

Membrana et colores ad opus perficiendum necessarios dono dedit summa cum principis munificentia ac liberalitate Sua Maiestas Ferdinandus, Bulgagorum Imperator, Augustissimus Dominus propinquitate coniunctus cum Reverenda Domna Maria Benedicta, huius monasterii moniale, quae ducessa de Württemberg nata est et nuncupata.

 Huius libri tegumentum ingeniose compositum atque ornamentum elegantiaque manu fictum est ab artificibus Abbatiae B.M.V. ad Lacum, singulari vero arte confectum est in officinis Editionis Herderianae Friburgensis.

Gravissimum hoc opus archetypi quasi denuo creandi atque formandi moniales Eibingensis intra sex mensium et anni spatium ad vigesimumquintum anniversarium Reverendae Dominae Reginstrudis Sauter Abbatissae die 8 Septembris anni iubilaei redemptionis nostrae MCMXXXIII celebratum summo cum gaudio intimaquae devotione perfecerunt.

 Est Donum Dei hoc opus divinum Deo gratias.