#Thanksfortyping In the Fifth Century

With the appearance of the hashtag ThanksForTyping on Twitter in 2017, the academic community began new conversations about the ways in which women’s contributions to the research and publications of their male family members have gone unacknowledged. Most of this activity has focused on academic work produced in the twentieth century, where there is a real pattern of male authors thanking their wives or female research assistants for typing their manuscripts. #ThanksForTyping has come to represent the ways in which activity described as 'typing' may in fact have encompassed more substantial editorial, authorial and research work, for which the male author received all of the credit. The movement has also sparked conversations about the extent to which academic productivity is supported by unacknowledged labour in the present day, not just in the past.

In 2021, a Thanks for Typing essay collection came out, which aims to shed light on--in the words of its blurb--'the wives, daughters, mothers, companions and female assistants who laboured in the shadows of famous men.' The earliest woman discussed is Monica, the mother of a fourth century North African bishop, Augustine; the latest are from the twentieth century, including women such as Eva Larkin (whose husband was the poet Phillip Larkin) and Edith Tolkien (whose husband's name you can probably guess).

 

You're welcome.

I thought of #ThanksforTyping when I came across the following passage in a set of letters I am currently reading for research. The author of the letters was a high-status Roman bureaucrat, Sidonius Apollinaris (c. 430 – 481/490 AD), who was born in Lyon and later became bishop of the city of Clermont.

The letters are fantastic reading for a late antique historian, not least because Sidonius lived through, and wrote about, a period of immense change, in which the governing structure of the Roman Empire permanently withdrew from what had been its western half, and was replaced by successor kingdoms ruled by barbarian groups, most of which had been part of the Roman world for decades as part of the Roman military. In letters, in particular, we can see men like Sidonius trying to negotiate the new political and social realities brought about by the end of imperial rule, while clinging to the cultural values of the imperial past.

For Sidonius, one of these values was the role of a wife in her husband's literary endeavours. As he writes to his friend Hesperius, who was about to get married:

...you must read constantly and without carelessness, and your thirst for reading must be without limit. You must not allow the thought that you will soon be happily married to turn you from this determination, ever remembering that in the old times of Marcia and Hortensius, Terentia and Tullius, Calpurnia and Pliny, Pudentilla and Apuleius, Rusticiana and Symmachus, the wives held candles and candlesticks for their husbands whilst they read or composed. And by all means, if you lament that in addition to your oratorical skill your poetical capacity and the keen edge of your tongue, which has been sharpened on the whetstone of industrious study, are blunted by the society of ladies, remember that Corinna often helped her Naso to complete a verse, and so it was with Lesbia and Catullus, Caesennia and Gaetulicus, Argentaria and Lucan, Cynthia and Propertius, Delia and Tibullus. So it is clear as daylight that literary workers find in marriage an opportunity for study and idlers an excuse for shirking it. To work, then, and do not let the cultivation of literature lose its value in your eyes because of the multitude of the ignorant; for it is a law of nature that in all the arts the splendour of attainment rises in value as it becomes rarer. (Letters, II.10, Sidonius, Poems. Letters: Books 1-2 trans. W. B. Anderson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), pp. 467-9)

I'm both frustrated and delighted to be encountering this passage for the first time. Frustrated because it seems to me to be a Very Big Deal and I can't believe I'd never come across it before. I'd like to think that this is a gap in my reading rather than a gap in the literature, but a quick scan of Eve McDonald's thesis on women in Sidonius' work turns up no discussion of this letter; and a search of the online research companion to Sidonius edited by Joop van Waarden, which maintains a comprehensive bibliography of publications, turns up limited results (a conference paper with an intriguing title and a forthcoming commentary among them; I should also check Emily Hemelrijk's Matrona Docta: Educated Women in the Roman Elite from Cornelia to Julia Domna and of course the new companion to Sidonius Apollinaris.)

Delighted because one of the most frequent complaints about the ancient women writers is that we know relatively few of their names--and look at all those names. Marcia, Terentia, Calpurnia, Pudentilla, Rusticiana, Lesbia, Caesennia, Argentaria, Cynthia, and Delia. Glorious! On a different note, one of the big questions that animates my work is how late antique people used the Classical literary past to cope with their violent, chaotic, and uncertain present--this passage is a wonderful illustration of that. Finally, the world of late Latin literature is often discussed and represented as exclusively masculine, so it is rare and wonderful to see a male author directly discussing the presence of women in it.

The latest among those named are Rusticiana and Symmachus (c. 345 – 402); Symmachus was one of the plutocrat senators of the fourth century, perhaps best known for his stalwart paganism in an era where more and more people were converting to Christianity; also known for his marvelous letter collection. While Sidonius is explicitly focused on examples from the glories of Classical literature, it is interesting to think of the couples he could have included had he chosen to include examples from his own day: one possibility would have been the poets Sabina and Ausonius. One can't help but wonder what Sidonius' wife Papianilla thought of the model of literary helpmeet her husband so enthusiastically extolled to Hesperius. Might she have been holding a candlestick as he wrote, reminding him of names to include?