The Luttrell Psalter (British Library, Add. ms 42130) is famed in song and legend for its illustrations, containing elaborate historiated initials, scenes of English country life and work which might be considered typical if the 14th century hadn't been rife with Black Death, rotten weather, famine and peasants revolting, and some very weird part human, part animal creatures cavorting in the margins. It also contains the most pompous portrait of a patron and book owner ever painted, Geoffrey de Luttrell. Well, perhaps with the possible exception of the Duc de Berry graciously acknowledging St Peter as he enters heaven.
Talk about establishing ownership. Galfridus Louterell, as he is designated here, liked to spread his armorials around.
The Luttrell Psalter also contains writing, which seems to get forgotten at times. The script is a form of Gothic textura, although it doesn't have that diagonal interwoven quality that gives textura, or textualis, its name by comparison with the appearance of a woven textile. Instead it is very upright, incredibly precisely drawn, and some of the letters are finished straight and flat at the bottom, without feet, which was much harder for the scribe to do accurately. It therefore gets called Gothic textura prescissa, or even Gothic textura prescissa sine pedibus (without feet). This particular example also has very fiddly, but somewhat ugly, little curly scrolls added to the ends of some letters.
The letters are all carefully separated and somehow, although the letter forms are essentially Gothic, it doesn't really look Gothic at all. It's not too hard to read, and there is a script sample and paleography exercise for it on Medieval Writing. The pretty and wacky pictures from the page are also there for your amusement, courtesy of the British Library website. You can now work your way through the whole manuscript there if you can navigate the search facility. Worth the trouble.
For reasons which are not entirely clear, some members of the medieval Tweeting community use the hashtag #notalion to post pictures of medieval illustrations of lions that don't look like lions. Part of the culture of foolish recreational medievalia, I guess. One of my favourite #notalion images is in the form of a decorative initial that has a lion apparently choking on it while eating spinach.
Which brings me to note that the graphics have been updated on the script sample and paleography exercise for a Continental protogothic script from the works of Suetonius in Medieval Writing, courtesy once again of the British Library image bank. And now that there is a colour illustration, it can be seen that the exercise has turned the lion quite green around the gills.
Very easy paleography in this example. Good one to start on.
Standard paleography textbooks tend to categorise scripts neatly, then present the finest or most representative of each type, giving the whole process of medieval handwriting an aura of greater order and system than it really has. I quite regularly get emails from users of the site who claim that the piece of medieval writing that they are trying to untangle doesn't look like any of the examples in books, or on the website for that matter. I have started a process of putting up samples of scripts on Medieval Writing which are just a little bit ordinary, not quite as standard as the archetypes and generally a bit more real world. Many of them are from the bits of medieval detritus that are floating around the world at the moment.
The current project is to indicate that the French term bâtarde covers a great range of styles and types, some of them exquisitely beautiful and legible and others a bit scratchy and hard to untangle. The latest example comes from a leaf from a little 15th century Flemish book of hours, with delicious little jewelled gilded initials and a bit of medievally leaf spray in the margins, but somewhat hasty and spiky calligraphy. It was probably somebody's wondrous treasure, but most likely not the Duchess of Whatsit.
No matter how many classificatory schemes we cook up, and how many generic schools of writing have existed, handwriting is always an individual and unique expression. That's why we love even the scruffiest little scraps of parchment we can find. They represent the last traces of somebody's individuality.
The most recent addition to Medieval Writing is The History of Gothic Book Hands. Not exactly the most original of topics, and probably to be found in more detail in every paleography book ever written, but I guess it should be there. In fact, it should have been there a long time ago, and now it is. In the course of preparing that I kept finding lots of other things that should be there, so I guess I will have to get to work.
