Good morning everyone,

I'm currently reading Sally Rooney's Normal People, which is about being at university and which makes me feel like Sally Rooney is having a good old stir around in all of the pond mulch at the bottom of my psyche. It's great! If you aren't reading it because of that sniffy LRB review that compared it unfavourable to Conversations With Friends, I might actually be liking it more.

Anyway, thinking as I am about university, here's a Fem Fri about women of incredible scholarly achievement. The sort of bread and butter of Fem Friday.

Let's start with Fatima al-Fihri, who founded the oldest continually operating institute of higher education in the world. This is the University of al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, Morocco in 859. Indirectly, it's the teaching of this University that speeded the adoption of the Arabic numbering system in Europe! Here's more about Fatima herself:

We know little about Fatima. Kairouan was a center of learning, and we know that Fatima was well educated. We know that her father did very well as a merchant in Fez, and that she and her sister inherited quite a sum. We know that she was married, and then widowed, all of which left her a wealthy, educated woman with control over how her wealth was to be spent (which was a significantly more likely combination in the Islamic world than it was in Europe in the 800s AD).

https://kevin.mcclear.net/2017/12/14/fatima-al-fihri/

Probably right now you are thinking, universities are cool, but what about the world's oldest continually operating library? I guess what you are looking for is St Catherine's Monastery, and here's Giulia Rossetto who is doing unbelievably exciting work on the ancient manuscripts it holds:

The style of the script suggested that it was probably written in Egypt in the fifth or sixth century, and Rossetto expected another Christian text. Instead, she began to see names from mythology: Persephone, Zeus, Dionysus. The lost writing was classical Greek. There was no internet connection on the train. But as soon as she got home, Rossetto rushed to her computer to check her transcription against known classical texts. “I tried different combinations, and there was nothing,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘Wow, this is something new.’”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/archaeologoists-only-just-beginning-reveal-secrets-hidden-ancient-manuscripts-180967455/

I'm not done with St Catherine's Monastery, because the first travel book was written by Egeria, who wrote about her pilgrimage to the monastery to her friends at home. I hope you enjoy this blog post about mapping her pilgrimage route and the inherent ambiguities of doing such a thing:

The geography detailed in Egeria’s extraordinary itinerary letters help us to reconstruct the broader network of movement amongst pilgrims in the late antique Mediterranean. Her itinerary, along with earlier itineraries such as the Itinerarium Burdigalense (Bordeaux Itinerary) of ca.333, together give us a good idea of the pilgrimage routes regularly used in the fourth century by both men and women. With the advent of GIS, there has been a push to map these pilgrimage routes, which in their original formats formed a textual list rather than a geospatial visualization.

https://sarahemilybond.com/2017/02/02/the-itinerarium-egeriae-mapping-egerias-pilgrimage-on-candlemas/

Happy weekend, wherever you are travelling,

Alex.