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More Spinning Stuff - Évangiles de Quenouilles
If you're on Facebook, and interested in distaff spinning, there's a lovely group there called Evangelical Church of Distaff Spinning. Not too much traffic, lovely people, and from time to time someone turns up a gem. So thanks to that group, I can now point you to the Évangiles de Quenouilles on the BnF site. If you click on the small image, you can read the original version - if you can read Old French, that is. (The script is, to my eyes, not too hard to read, which is nice - I find it superhard to try and read something in a hard-to-decipher script and in a language I do not know well.)
Apparently there's an English edition to these Évangiles, too (available as an ebook). Here's a review (mostly behind a paywall) of the book.* My quick search via google Scholar has not turned up much more - there's a Dutch version that you can access online, with the text from a 1910 edition/transcription.
The contents are advice - the "gospels" that are passed on between women as they meet for spinning. A lot of them are medical or concerning health. You can read a bit more about the medical advice in this paper.
* I do wonder about this passage in the review:
"The 'distaff' of the title is the rod – or 'staff' – from which yarn is wound onto a spindle. In figurative terms, it is the mechanism by which the thread of the oral narrative – a collection of folk wisdom (or 'gospels') told by a group of peasant women (the evangelists of the title) – is spun into a written text by the male narrator, an unidentified cleric."
Weird mis-explanations of distaff function, or distaff use, or how spinning is done pop up again and again. This, to me, is really irksome and I do wonder - are other techniques and their tools mis-explained just as badly and frequently as spinning and its tools, and it's just an awareness bias that I have, or is spinning really more of a victim than other techniques?
Comments 2
Thanks for the shout-out about the group! ^_^
I have a copy of the translation and it is very interesting (though there's very little about spinning in it, despite the title, and it's hard to know to what extent it is fiction vs. a sort of early folklorist collection). That bit of the review annoyed me, too. It does seem that people come up with some exceedingly absurd ideas about spinning, even in otherwise very academic and well-researched work.
There's nothing as frustrating as people assuming they already know something, and therefore have no need to check up on it. In a non-spinning example, I recently read a news story connected with the recent murders in Uvalde, which opened by describing "Make Me a Channel of Your Peace" as a prayer to St Francis. Ten seconds with a search engine would have told the writer that it is a prayer BY St Francis, not TO St Francis. But they already "knew" so they didn't bother to check.