your randomness of the day

[lirazel]

Y'all, I have so many problems with Catholic theology and the institution of the Catholic church, but monks and nuns are consistently the best (like, seriously, if I was Catholic, I think I would make such a great nun).

Oh, My Hand: Complaints Medieval Monks Scribbled in the Margins of Illuminated Manuscripts

New parchment, bad ink; I say nothing more.

[You don't need to, really. A dull pencil is the worst.]

I am very cold.

That's a hard page and a weary work to write it.

Let the reader's voice honor the writer's pen.

[which I choose to read as: APPRECIATE ME, DAMMIT. I PUT A LOT OF WORK INTO THIS.

This page has not been written very slowly.

[translation: forgive me my typos. Either that or it's sarcastic]

The parchment is hairy.

[Gross.]

The ink is thin.

Thank God, it will soon be dark.

Oh, my hand.

[I feel you, bro.]

Now I've written the whole thing: for Christ's sake, get me a drink.

St. Patrick of Armagh, deliver me from writing.

[I will be using that phrase ALL THE TIME.]

While I wrote I froze, and what I could not write by the beams of the sun I finished by candlelight.

[Frankly, that sounds like poetry.]

Writing is excessive drudgery. It crooks your back, it dims your sight, it twists your stomach and your sides.

As the harbor is welcome to the sailor, so is the last line to the scribe.

This is sad! O little book! A day will come in truth when someone over your page will say, ‘The hand that wrote it is no more.’

And upupa_epops, if you would like to talk about LM Montgomery in the comments, I would approve of that most heartily.

Comments

[pocochina.livejournal.com]

In fairness, there's also a lot of different orders. I'm the last person to defend gender roles in the Church (oh, really?) but it's not necessarily a uniform thing even within a particular era. The current crackdown on American nuns is a big shift even over the lifetime of your average American Catholic.

avoid being married off to people they didn't want to marry

be early lesbian separatists....

I still don't understand that particular decision.

I think it was at least in part to avoid the civic institution of the clergy becoming another aristocracy in an environment where people learned their trade from their families. If priests could have kids, then those kids would have been more like heirs.

I mean, it's long outdated - I'm not sure that nostalgia for that kind of political power isn't part of the way the higher-ups still cling to it - and it's certainly part of the damaging separate spheres ideology. But it does make some sense in a way that was slightly less counter-democratic than the environment in which the decision was made.

[penny-lane-42.livejournal.com]

The current crackdown on American nuns is a big shift even over the lifetime of your average American Catholic

Interesting. Makes sense, of course--there's diversity within every denomination.

I think it was at least in part to avoid the civic institution of the clergy becoming another aristocracy in an environment where people learned their trade from their families. If priests could have kids, then those kids would have been more like heirs.

That does make a sort of sense. Probably not the best solution to that problem, but I can see where the thinking comes from.