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Saturday, June 19, 2010

Horrible Old Handwriting

Whenever I decide to put up a new handwriting sample on Medieval Writing, there may be some debate on what it should be. The family medievalist is a historian of the later middle ages, and he thinks I should put up endless samples from the English chancery archives from the 13th century onwards, of every type of historical document. He has even been known to transcribe and translate them for me.
I am actually trying to gradually fill in a more broad ranging history of the types of medieval handwriting, including nasty old stuff. He reckons nobody would want to read that, but I have found that not only do people tell me that they have read it, I have even had exercises of very ancient and illegible scrawl corrected by assiduous users.
So in the interest of filling in some of the earlier history of medieval handwriting development, the latest addition is a piece of utterly horrible Merovingian minuscule book hand. I couldn't actually read it properly myself, so I have used a couple of cribs. That should mean, barring typos, that it is reasonably accurate. Nevertheless, any suggestions to the contrary will be gravely considered.
As an additional note, in relation to the last posting, I discovered that there were two copies of the French paleography book in question on the Internet Archive, but that both were slightly defective in different places. So while I am spending considerable time printing it one page at a time, I have saved a tree or two as a result of not printing the whole thing twice. The grand international digital library still has a long way to go, but it is getting somewhere.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Eh, I thought that didn't look too bad and then I tried transcribing it. Okay, good points well made. However, seems to me that the dynamic transcription on the page you link to misses out the last word of each line. Is that intended? Or is it not rendering properly in my browser?

Dianne said...

It's all there actually. Must have something to do with your browser settings. Perhaps try reducing the default font size. One of the biggest problems with trying to do fancy pants stuff on the web is that you don't know what is going to happen on other people's systems.

Dianne said...

Just checked it in all the different browsers. Looks OK. You realise you have to scan the cursor along the lines as well as down to get it all.

Anonymous said...

Ah, no, I hadn't realised that, sorry, I fail at the Internet. In that case, it's great!

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