By Katrin on Wednesday, 08 June 2022
Category: and now for something completely different

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?

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