SC - Re: sources of sources.

[Philip & Susan Troy]

> Date: Fri, 12 Jun 1998 18:23:15 EDT
> From: RuddR at aol.com
> Subject: Re: SC - Re: sources of sources.
> 
> Very likely, a variety of people from the wealthier parts of society, noble,
> gentry and middle-class alike, both specially commisioned cookery books and
> bought them ready-made,  either to present to their cooks to use, or to show
> off to company as an item no cultured household should be without.  Some were
> destined to become family heirlooms (a good way to explain the survival of so
> many).  Wherever they ended up, surely some of them were originally purchased
> by members of the middle class.  Did the Menagier specially commision the
> cookery books he owned, or did he buy them at a bookstall?  We can't tell; he
> didn't save his receipts (no pun intended).

Another possibility is that he (if he was indeed a magistrate, court
official, or perhaps even himself a clerk of some kind, as has been
suggested) knew a colleague in the Royal Library, or equivalent office.
(Platina was the Chief Librarian at the Vatican for a time, for example,
IIRC.) Bearing in mind that there were no printed books to speak of at
the time, I'm inclined to favor the idea of commisioning a copy of, say,
Taillevent's Viandier as a professional courtesy, and the distinct
possibility is that no money changed hands,
> 
> And tangential to all this, how many literate chief cooks were there, who
> could actually read a cookery book for themselves?  Chiquart dictated his work
> to a scribe.  I can imagine a chief cook of a great household, having to
> prepare a major banquet and needing some ideas, having to get his Lord's
> scribe to read to him from the cookery book.

I can imagine it, too, but I don't know how well the example of Chiquart
holds water. He appears to have had access to a pretty broad education
in medicine and philosophy in addition to his own field, and while he
does seem to have dictated to a scribe, that doesn't suggest to me he
was illiterate. He may, of course, have had what we would equate to a
fifth or sixth-grade reading level, which might make it difficult to
record huge reams of information quickly. Another aspect is that up
until the nineteenth century, in many parts of the world (and until
today if you count labor unions) it was considered wrong to deprive
people of their professional function. Duke Amadeus had a head cook, and
he also had a scribe. What more natural than to have them work together
on a book?

On a side note about literacy, I was reading yesterday a pretty
well-researched fictional account of Gaius Julius Caesar's Gallic wars.
The author suggested that _some_ of Caesar's military advantage was due
to years of experience in the civil service: he was able to dictate
simultaneously to two or more scribes (copying different documents), and
was an apparent rarity in his ability to read a document from beginning
to end, without a delay while he scanned the entire thing. Whether this
is a comment on the nobility of the Roman Republic, Romans in general,
or the educatonal standard for anyone who wasn't a scribe, I couldn't
say.

Adamantius  
______________________________________
Phil & Susan Troy
troy at asan.com
============================================================================

To be removed from the SCA-Cooks mailing list, please send a message to
Majordomo at Ansteorra.ORG with the message body of "unsubscribe SCA-Cooks".

============================================================================