Words, Words, Words

Hermione deliberated for several days over whether or not to tell Professor Snape about the manuscript she had found. On the one hand, she was certain he would be fascinated by her discovery and might even offer his assistance with the remaining documents in the hope of finding other intellectually and historically valuable texts. She certainly wasn't going to get help from him by any other method; he clearly considered her work beneath him. On the other hand, if Slytherin's manuscript turned out to contain anything truly momentous, she didn't want Snape to usurp the glory of publicising its contents to the wizarding world. She might be merely the Hogwarts librarian now, she reflected, but she hoped one day to make a name for herself in the field of research and, perhaps, acquire a more prestigious appointment. Her current position, in her view, was best considered a stepping-stone.

After a while, however, this objection struck her as being somewhat petty. She hoped that if their roles were reversed, and Snape had discovered something of Gryffindor's, he would share it with her; could she really allow her ambition to deny him access to something that would surely bring him so much pleasure? In the end, she decided to tell him about the manuscript. She could live with shared glory.

She broached the matter with him at breakfast on Saturday morning. The timing was a calculated decision on her part: had she raised the matter during the week, he would have insisted that she hand over the document for him to peruse at his leisure. On Saturday mornings, however, she knew he had no commitments and would be forced to agree to viewing the manuscript on her terms. Sharing the discovery was all very well, but she'd rather not share custody of the document itself if she could help it.

It took her a little while, however, to work up the nerve to speak; throughout the meal, she kept glancing over at Snape, wondering whether it would be a good time to address him. By the time she finished her eggs, he was staring back at her with narrowed black eyes.

"Is there something I can help you with, Miss Granger?" he asked, his tone laced with irritation, as she poured herself another cup of tea.

She was proud of herself; the teapot didn't so much as quiver in her suddenly unsteady hand. "Yes, actually," she replied. "There's something I'd like to show you in the library." She stood, smoothing down her robes, and picked up her mug.

"Oh, very well." His long-legged stride carried him away from the high table and out of the door of the Great Hall before Hermione had even descended the dais; once into the corridor, she trotted after him to catch up, feeling stupid and trying not to spill her tea.

Snape preceded her into the library, letting the door swing shut practically in her face, and watched impassively as she struggled to open it again with her one free hand. When she finally succeeded, she stalked past him, infuriated, already regretting her generous nature and sense of fair play. "Come on, then," she snapped.

He followed her docilely enough to the chamber where she had found the manuscript. She had cleared away some of the stacks of parchment, leaving Slytherin's text alone on the desk. Stooping slightly to fit through the door of the chamber, Snape approached the desk and gazed down at the parchment there. "Well?"

Hermione explained how she had come across the manuscript and pointed at the tiny signature. "I assume you recognise the name," she said dryly.

Snape bent forward and inspected the handwriting curiously. "Yes... I assume you realise that this could easily be a copy."

"I don't think it is," she contradicted him. "I've spent the last few days researching medieval hands. The script is from the correct location and time period. That information, combined with the signature, suggests to me that this is an original. Of course," she mused, "without carbon dating, we can't really know for certain."

"Carbon dating?" Snape regarded her doubtfully.

"It's when you examine the..."

"I know what it is," he interrupted her scathingly. "Carbon dating is next to useless in dating parchment. For one thing, it's not precise enough, and for another, a particular piece of parchment could be used many times. Even if it were possible to determine a reasonable date, it could be hundreds of years earlier than the actual text."

"The ink could be dated," she said stubbornly. He sneered at her. "Anyway, that's not really the point," she continued. "What's interesting is the content itself. Look at this section." She leaned over the piece of parchment and indicated the sentence she had spent so much time puzzling over. "Right here, it looks as if someone has made an amendment. Do you see?"

"I could see it, if it weren't obscured by that rat's nest you call hair."

Flushing with anger, Hermione swept her hair behind her shoulders and glared at him. "Better?"

Ignoring her, he bent low toward the table and followed her pointing finger while she resisted the urge to make a rude remark about grease stains on the parchment. When long moments had passed without a reaction from Snape, she began to tap her finger on the parchment impatiently. Really, she had deciphered the sentence a lot more quickly! She stared around the room, feeling slightly bored now, and was thus startled when his fingers closed over hers, stifling the tapping.

Uncomfortable, she snatched her hand away, and he straightened. "You may be right," he commented grudgingly, "but I don't see what relevance this has."

She gaped at him. "What?"

Snape leaned casually against the desk and crossed his arms over his chest patronisingly. "You obviously came to the conclusion that the word genius, talent, was changed to genus, race...but it makes no difference. The implication remains the same: wizarding culture is tainted by association with Muggles." He smirked, clearly under the impression that he had punctured her theory.

Then Hermione, smiling triumphantly, dealt her trump card. "Actually, he's not referring to Muggles. You spent long enough reading...didn't you notice his choice of words?"

"What are you talking about?"

Her finger flew over the parchment, directing his eyes to a fact she had noticed only the day before. "Throughout the text, Slytherin refers to wizards always as magi. Pretty standard, that. When he refers to Muggles, he uses viri. But here, we have the word hominum. He's not talking about Muggles, or even Muggle men. He's talking about all men."

Snape turned abruptly and picked up the parchment, causing Hermione to gasp in outrage, and angled it toward the light. "You'll have to forgive me," he said sourly. "My vision isn't what it once was." After another lengthy pause, he returned the manuscript to the desk, looking at Hermione thoughtfully. "That certainly puts a different spin on the 'knowledge' he mentions."

Hermione blushed. "How can we confirm it, though?" she asked, changing the subject. "Confirm that it was amended, I mean. Is there some sort of spell we could use to reveal what the text originally said?"

Snape rolled his eyes, a gesture Hermione found remarkably infantile. "You've been writing on parchment for years," he said. "What do you do when you make a mistake? That is, assuming know-it-alls make mistakes," he added mockingly.

Affronted, Hermione said, "I correct it with my wand."

For the barest hint of a second, she saw a tiny light of respect in his eyes. Then he responded, "Well, that isn't what's been done here. In the Middle Ages, mistakes on parchment would be corrected by scraping away the ink and rubbing the cleared section smooth to be written on again. While it would be childishly easy to go through your student file"... here his lips twitched into a taunting smirk..."and reveal all of the errors you made, I know of no spell that will restore parchment that has been scraped clean and rewritten."

"Oh," Hermione murmured, slightly defeated. "What can we do, then?"

"What real scholars do, as you would know if you were one. We look for independent corroboration."

"What if there isn't any?"

Snape shrugged. "We can't always get what we want, Miss Granger."

Much later that day, alone in his rooms in the dungeons, Severus Snape found his thoughts returning irresistibly to Salazar Slytherin's manuscript. Despite his professed doubt, he secretly agreed with his former student that it was probably an autograph text. While she had assumed that he was a slow reader, he had actually translated the sentence she had pointed out in seconds and spent the remaining time skimming the rest of the text. He had recognised the material instantly; it had been copied countless times and was included in every published volume of Slytherin's work that Snape had ever seen. The text was one of Slytherin's shorter pieces, written early in his career not long after the founding of Hogwarts. It was generally assumed to represent his early exploration of the topic of pureblood supremacy. Most of what he had written later in life consisted of in-depth analysis of and justification for that doctrine.

Hermione's keen eye, however, had spotted that tiny amendment...and Slytherin's unusual word choice...and now Snape was beginning to wonder if her belief in its relevance was really so mistaken after all. Knowing that his attempts to concentrate on anything else would result in utter failure, Snape gave in to his preoccupation with the manuscript. He poured himself a fortifying drink and wandered into his office where he took a seat behind his desk and pulled out a fresh piece of parchment and a quill.

First, he copied out the sentence from the text as he remembered it:

sagarum genus maxima fons est potestatis magicae; ne attenuetur experientia hominum

Then he wrote the sentence again with the substitution Hermione had supplied:

sagarum genius maxima fons est potestatis magicae; ne attenuetur experientia hominum

Underneath hominum, he added the words magi and viri Then he settled back and surveyed the parchment critically.

The change in meaning was really quite significant, he admitted to himself. His mind, quicker at analysis, perhaps, than Hermione's, raced along the implications of that change. Scholars had always assumed that sagarum genus referred to the race of wizards and witches in general; the wizarding world having been largely matrilineal in the Middle Ages, presumably wizards had tried to ensure that their offspring would be magical by marrying witches. This interpretation was by no means certain; for one thing, this practice had undoubtedly still resulted in the occasional Squib. Other scholars had opted for a less specific interpretation: Slytherin had written "the race of witches" because, well, witches were the ones who bore the children.

But when one changed genus to genius, suddenly "the magical race, generally" became "the talent of witches, specifically." Snape's gaze coasted along the sentence and focussed on the last two words.

While he could easily believe that Slytherin was concerned about an influx of Muggle culture polluting the wizarding world, he could not quite fathom why this should affect witches but not wizards. His remark to Hermione in the library about "knowledge" had, in truth, been joking...it had been worth it to see her blush like that...but now he suspected it had been all too correct. If hominum truly referred to all men, not just Muggles...

Snape settled back in his chair, steepling his fingers and gazing blindly at the ceiling. It positively irked him that she had spotted that little discrepancy and he had not. She had, however, had days to look at it, while he had had less than five minutes. It also bothered him slightly that she had waited so long to tell him about the manuscript, although he understood perfectly why that was. He would not have wanted to share it either. Hermione Granger was, in Snape's estimation, an officious, grasping girl with too high an opinion of herself. The fact that she remained unaware, despite her cleverness, of the impression she made on people never failed to amaze him. She had achieved her academic success through graft rather than innate intelligence. She had no flair. She was, quite possibly, the most boring individual he had ever encountered. And yet she had immediately picked up on the implications of Slytherin's manuscript. The apparent contradiction boggled his mind.

He glanced down at his notes again. The "knowledge of men" that witches were supposed to avoid seemed obvious to him now. After all, many societies throughout history had subscribed to the belief that virgins retained a kind of power or purity that more "experienced" woman had lost; one only had to call to mind the cult of Artemis and the virgin martyrs of Christianity to make that connection.

Why, Snape wondered, perplexed, would Slytherin have urged witches to remain virgins? How were magical communities supposed to reproduce under such a system? Wizards would have needed to marry Muggle women, which certainly would have put paid to any ambitions to keep the wizarding race "pure." The very idea was completely incompatible with everything else Slytherin had ever written! There was no possibility whatsoever for "pureblood supremacy" if none of the witches were supposed to have children.

Witches, virgins, pureblood supremacy... Suddenly he sat up straight in his chair. Have we been wrong about this all along?