Medieval Manuscripts and Paleography

  Medieval manuscripts and paleography were what this blog was originally about, but this has got a bit swamped lately with some other themes. My website Medieval Writing still seems to be used, and I get some interesting feedback from users, despite the fact that it is becoming technologically aged. Here are some of the posts that people have found interesting.

Web Sites and Medieval Manuscripts Something I thought in 2006. Wonder if it still holds good.
Medieval Manuscripts on the Move Digitisation of manuscript collections has come a long way since 2007.
Classification of Scripts Yes, I still have radical ratbag views about script classification in paleography.
Manuscripts and Information Control A whole bunch of people have been devoting their efforts to medieval marginalia since I wrote this.
Why Paleography Sucks Never do irony on the web. 
Disappearing Paleography From the days when you got blog post comments from interested participants, not just snake oil salesmen and spivs.
Writing and Remembering One of those random thought bubbles I should try to retrieve some time.
Not That Voynich Manuscript Again NEVER mention the V****** M********* in any forum on the internet.
Horrible Old Handwriting Merovingian minuscule in this case. It's not all about the pretty stuff.
Gothic Book Hands Gothic Book Hands. Pointer to section on Medieval Writing website.
Special English Characters Another pointer.
1066 and All That Dianne has bitch attack about historical periodisation, and another pointer to post Conquest Old English writing.
Of Tennis Balls and Mulberry Trees Pointer to script example of Gothic cursive from a very strange manuscript fragment.
John Paston's Books Pointer to paleography exercise on John Paston's book list in the British Library.
History of the Familiar Pointer to history of humanistic minuscule.
It's Personal Wee note on a medieval autograph.
Dirty Medieval Books Pointer to interesting work by Kathryn Rudy. For some reason a lot of people have clicked on this. Hope they were not disappointed.
Monastic Pressmarks Monastic pressmarks. Pointer to section of website on them.
Glossed Bible Pointer to a bit of interesting medieval detritus.
Little French Things Pointer to script sample of 14th century French cursive.
You Want Vinegar With Your Oak Galls? My most viewed blog post ever. If any subject arouses passion and commitment it is the correct formulation for iron gall ink.
The Writing of the Illiterate Lombards More irony, Lombardic minuscule, and more iron gall ink.
Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax Pointer to website section on seals.
Medieval Recycling Pointer to script sample of French cursive on a document recycled into a book wrapper.
Boring Jobs and Bizarre Coincidences Hufnagelschrift.
Medieval Documents Medieval documents. Pointer to website section on dealing with them.
What Not To Do With Your Manuscripts Pointer to website section on manuscript conservation.
Manuscripts and Naked Hands The great white gloves controversy.
Medieval Digimania The ever changing status of digitised medieval manuscripts on the web.
When Did Latin Become Dead? Pointer to website sample of scramboozled 16th century English and Latin.
Ferocity of Iron Gall Ink That stuff again, and how it consumes itself.
Vale Notice of passing of Malcolm Parkes.
Ever Wonder What Paleographers Do? The Getty knows.
Working Script for (Somewhat) Ordinary Books French batarde.
Blockbuster Epic Resource for Paleographers and Historians Dictionary of Medieval Latin from English Sources. Think it's now up on the web as well.
Colophons and Marginalia and All That Colophon and gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels.
Irish Gospels Insular minuscule.
Bored with Gothic? Try This. Beneventan minuscule.
Sweet Caroline Caroline minuscule.
Protogothic and Choking Lions Protogothic.
Beasties from the Bestiary Gothic textura, with animals.
It's Gothic Jim, But Not As We Know It That totally weirdshit script from the Luttrell Psalter.
Magdalen in Blue Gothic rotunda.
Hoccleve on Chaucer Gothic bastarda
Flyleaf Friday. Or When is a Manuscript Finished? On adding prayers to books of hours.
Notarial Signs Notarial signs.
Medieval Graffiti and Medieval Marginalia Ponderings on scratchings in the margins of life.
Cutting Up Manuscripts Why you shouldn't cut up manuscripts, and why people did.

Digital Humanities - At Last?

  In 1995 I found myself with  PhD in Archaeology and Anthropology and no academic job in prospect. Too old for a junior position, too inexperienced for a senior one, too overqualified for peripheral academic positions on offer, and too married for interviewing teams to believe that I would be willing to put in the hard yards to work in a different city to my husband. Yes, a (female) professor actually put the hard word on me about my domestic arrangements if I were to accept a job; illegal according to equal opportunity provisions but she sprung it on me over a "friendly" cup of coffee outside the interview room.
  I put my newly acquired free time to use by investigating ways of using multimedia technology in teaching on behalf of the Family Medievalist, my longsuffering spouse who taught medieval history at the Australian National University. This has always been unpaid. At that time a number of academics at the ANU were trying similar experiments, but all in a disco-ordinated way and without support from higher echelons of the establishment. We held regular meetings in which we discovered we were all using different software, platforms, technologies and we all came from different disciplines. The science bods were amazed to find medievalists in their midst, as if they thought we could not personally progress beyond the quill pen.
  In the late 1990s and early 2000s university management and senior academics alike were quite averse to this kind of activity. Some felt threatened that they would be required to do more work and acquire even more skills if this sort of thing got about. The university thought it ought to be able to make money out of such efforts, even those by an unpaid volunteer. Even archives thought we should have to pay for services that would otherwise be provided for free to any wandering member of the public, because we were obviously going to make a squillion out of it. Occasional meetings and conferences with other excitable cognoscenti punctuated periods of avoiding garlic and silver swords in the corridors from less enthusiastic members of the faculty.
   As I have mentioned in previous postings on these projects, the whole thing fell to custard because of the rapid changes to technology. Without a team of experts updating things constantly, multimedia projects from this era just died of premature senility. Just one of my projects survived and grew, the website Medieval Writing.

  Medieval Writing was originally designed to teach paleography to students who hated the subject, much to the distress of the Family Medievalist who kept trying to persuade them that it was the key to discovering anything in medieval history. It ended up on the web, rather than a multimedia CD, because by giving it away for free I could keep control over it and develop it in my own way. It expanded to cover aspects of literacy and the nature of things that medieval people did and didn't write about. It has been rejigged technologically several times, but now seems to be coming to the term of its natural life yet again.
  It is also galloping towards 300,000 clicks on the home page. Now that is over a long time, and some folks may keep coming back for return visits. Equally, many others don't go through the home page as they come in through Google searches or have bookmarked their favourite bit, like the index of scripts. It is not a strictly quantitative measure of anything I guess, but I can't help wondering how many copies I would have sold had I written a paleography book, or even how many people might have borrowed it from a library.
  For that matter, what would my odds have been on getting a paleography book published in the first place, not being a member of the academic establishment? Certainly, publishing a book doesn't let you grow and develop a project over many years as a website does. There is no editor, but experts have written to me at times with suggestions and corrections, and they can be fixed instantly if needed. The biggest peer review group in the world is out there.
  Strangely, some people just didn't believe it was real. On more than one occasion I have had a friend or colleague say something like, "I got a recommendation of your website from somebody in America. She found it on Google and asked if I knew you. I must look at it one day." or "I  saw your site listed on X university's link list. Amazing!" or "If you type 'paleography' into Google there's a site called Medieval Writing that comes out on top. That's not yours, is it?" There was a whole bunch of people in academia, not all of them old, that just didn't believe the digital thing was happening. The truly old academics just pined away and died when their copy typing secretaries retired and they had to type and file their own emails.
  An interesting aspect is the feedback that a website allows. Yes, I have had emails from schoolkids wanting ideas for assignments and folks wanting me to identify the coat of arms on the antique set of spoons that they inherited from their greatgrandmother and deluded folks who thought they should inherit a country estate with an abbey on it because they have a document in their possession which belonged to Anne Boleyn's lady in waiting. I have also had some fascinating conversations from people who would never have gone near a paleography book; an international law professor working on digital signatures or a linguist investigating modern urban dialects.
  This is proto-Digital Humanities, I guess, but the tools remained very primitive for a long time. The first manuscript facsimiles on the website were old black and white photographs, either out of copyright or used with permission.

  Yup, that is horrible to the point of totally unusable on a modern computer screen.

British Library, Cotton Tiberius C II, f.34. Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica

  Rescanning helped, but the job got bigger and bigger as the site grew. Great thanks to the British Library for letting us have a go back then when things were so experimental. For legal documents, old Public Record Office scanned photocopies have been replaced by digital downloads from the National Archives. Now, of course, the number of high quality digital images of medieval manuscripts available on the web is enormous and growing, and so are the tools to make use of them.
  There was very little on the web on paleography or manuscripts in general in the way back when, but now resources are proliferating. There are general introductions and specialist sites and tools for producing interactive transcripts far more sophisticated than the clunky little exercises that I devised for Medieval Writing. I'd ask if anybody needs a DHTML programmer in Dreamweaver for Internet Explorer 3 or a Flash 5 programmer, but I think I've forgotten how to do it.
  There are communities of scholars interacting through social media and cross-fertilising ideas. This facilitates friendly conversations between people with new ideas, not overseen by a session chairperson with an overriding agenda and a tenured professorship. (Oops. Getting a bit radical here.) It all makes things hopeful that Digital Humanities can actually happen: that it can be an open door to all interested participants, not an elite privilege for high fee paying students in enrolled courses. (Yeah, yeah. Waves red rag and stands on the barricades, yelling.)
  So here's to all 300,000 of you finger clickers who have helped carry the torch through the Dark Ages of Digital Humanities. And here's to the clever young folks who are going to take it to the high Gothic stage of beauty and functionality. If I can find a fountain of eternal youth (or at least eternal late middle age) I may be able to participate in it.
  Ultimately, I think the moral to this story is that any subject, even one which students are reluctant to tackle, can be made fascinating with ingenuity. Before the age of the internet, which I believe is 25 this year, so much, much younger than me, resources for subjects like paleography were hidden away in obscure corners of academic libraries. Those resources are likely to be hidden even deeper in reserve collections and underground bunkers these days, but they can be translated into wonderful concepts accessible to all. Medieval marginalia of cats, killer bunnies, farting priests and nuns picking penises off trees may get their attention, but there is so much more that can engage people. We now have the resources and technology to do it.

Hoccleve on Chaucer

  Continuing with the mentally undemanding but nevertheless satisfying job of upgrading manuscript images on Medieval Writing with shiny colour reproductions from the web, the latest offering is a page from Hoccleve's Regement of Princes (British Library, Harley 4866, f.88r), which he wrote to instruct young Prince Harry how to conduct himself once he became King Henry V, then presented it to him. My God, wouldn't that be annoying. "Thank you my friend, I will surely treasure it." Exit stage left muttering "Daft old bugger!" Sorry, overimaginating history again.
  The script sample and paleography exercise display a Gothic bastarda script. I love it when you get into paleographic bastardry, because it just means that everything is getting mixed up and unclassifiable. This particular form of book hand is very English and owes part of its heritage to Gothic textura, and another part to chancery cursive. The English royal chancery had a great influence on scripts, not only in the legal domain, and also spelling and language in the later middle ages. Literacy escapes from being the exclusive preserve of the church and becomes a major part of lay life and government. Anyway, it looks like this.

  It looks a bit tricky at first, but once you get your eye in it is very neat and consistent. Just be prepared for some variant English spelling and be aware that what looks like a y with a straight tail is actually a thorn and represents th. The page is about Geoffrey Chaucer and the hand which is pointing to a line of script is attached to a portrait of said Chaucer. He looks like this.

  I think our image of GC as a benign and amiable old buffer with a bit of a naughty twinkle in his eye and smirk around his mouth probably comes from this image. Would we have read The Canterbury Tales differently if he had been portrayed as ugly, cantankerous and crosseyed?

Magdalen in Blue

  The latest updated graphics in Medieval Writing are to a script sample and paleography exercise of the Gothic rotunda script from the Melissande Psalter  (British Library, Egerton 1139), a 12th century manuscript produced in the Holy Land. The page displayed is a prayer to St Mary Magdalen, in rhyming couplets that would no doubt make it easy to remember.
  There are always surprises when upgrading from old black and white images to the beautiful colour reproductions that the British Library allows us to use today. This one was no exception.

  Mary Magdalen is more usually portrayed in medieval art wearing red, symbolising her sin. She was the patron saint of redeemed sinners. This example shows her in a beautiful blue robe, a colour usually reserved for the Virgin. Her sins truly are redeemed. And is that a purely decorative frieze behind her legs, or are those shadows of seated human figures? Maybe getting a little over-imaginative here.
  Also in relation to Medieval Writing, it has been notable that I have been steadily adding new websites to the Paleography Links page, as more material creeps its way online. I really thought things would happen more quickly in this area than they have. Some vintage presentations survive, and still work, but some others have vanished. Recently I have added several links to the Spanish and Portuguese section, which shows that things have improved since I once googled "Spanish paleography" and the first item listed was a page from my own website which said that the only things I knew about Spanish paleography came from a 19th century book which I had downloaded from The Internet Archive. The body of online knowledge in this area is steadily increasing.
  Now to my wish list. The steadily growing corpus of digitised manuscripts online, especially those allowing free access for use of the images, contains amazing numbers of beautiful illuminated books. It would be sooo nice to have some images of documents - charters, petitions, accounts, wills and the like - to be able to use. I think I get more emails from people trying to read documents than those wanting to read books, for a whole bunch of different reasons. Mostly I'm stuck with the old grungy black and white images from antique paleography books.

It's Gothic Jim, But Not As We Know It

 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.

Beasties from the Bestiary

  Purely coincidentally, the last two script samples and paleography exercises for which I have updated the graphics in Medieval Writing (courtesy once again of the British Library's generous usage policies for their digital facsimiles) have been extracts from that wondrous medieval text known as the bestiary. The first (Royal 12 C xix) concerns the partridge, a bird which is painted with a very bad character. This is a nice example of protogothic/early Gothic, however you want to designate it. Because I now have access to the whole manuscript rather than just a small segment of the page, the displayed text and transcription has been extended. The full translation is still pending. I may have to give a bit of a rough guide rather than a translation, as the peculiarities of the bestiary text defeated even the family medievalist.

  The second (Harley 3244) concerns the elephant, a creature considered to be of much more moral character than the perfidious partridge. The script is a very small Gothic textura. The images of elephants, usually depicted with a castle full of soldiers on their back, are often grossly anatomically inaccurate, but this one is a pretty good representation of an elephant. It looks very like a depiction of the town band of Cremona as drawn by Matthew Paris, so perhaps, like Matthew Paris, the artist had actually seen as elephant or perhaps he took elephant drawing lessons from Matthew Paris. Suffice to say that everybody on board the elephant appears to be having a jolly old time and this has to be the best medieval party elephant ever.

  I adore bestiaries. The text is crazy and the images are delightful. In many ways the bestiary is the absolute prototype of a medieval text, if you exclude the liturgical texts which supposedly were reproduced accurately and consistently. The work comes in multitudinous variations, based on a core text, Physiologus, whoever or whatever he or that may have been. The text is confused, corrupted, with startling links to very ancient depictions of animals or mythical creatures in the ancient world. It has also been added to from various sources, including local familiar animals so that hedgehogs (dutifully carrying grapes on their spines) could share a page with gryphons or cockatrices.

  As far as natural history goes, the descriptions are bizarrely inaccurate, and they are overlaid with moral lessons. While the pictorial character of each creature may be reasonably consistent, and the general character of each animal follows a pattern, the precise text varies from manuscript to manuscript. There is no definitive text. This means you can't just google a transcript or translation of a section, like you can the Vulgate Bible. This is true of so much literature from the manuscript era. However, picking the text to pieces to try to find some authentic core in a reductionist mode is fruitless. Each example is an authentic witness to something somewhere. If a few creatures from Gerald of Wales appear occasionally, as they do, this is not an intrusion but a legitimate form of the text which meant something in a particular place and time.

  So enjoy the paleography lessons, then waste many happy hours poking through all the other amazing creatures of the bestiary. There are worse ways to spend a wet afternoon.

    I leave you to contemplate the battle between the crocodile and the hydrus (also Royal 12 C XIX), in which the crocodile swallows the hydrus but loses the bout because the hydrus gnaws his way out through his guts. The bestiary can be a bit savage at times.

Protogothic and Choking Lions

  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.

Sweet Caroline

  I have updated the graphics in Medieval Writing from the British Library website of images available for use under Creative Commons licence for two splendid examples of English Caroline minuscule. The Ramsay Psalter has a big, bold and imposing script, while the Harley Psalter is neat and delicate. It shows that script typology is a question of form, not style.
  The Harley Psalter not only has a colour image, but I can display a whole page, which I couldn't before as I only had photographs of segments. That meant more work to update, of course, but the results are greatly improved.
  The Harley Psalter is famed for its selection of fine and intricate coloured line drawings illustrating each Psalm. These were copied from an earlier manuscript, the Utrecht Psalter, although the text was not, as the versions of the Psalms used in each is not the same, and neither are the scripts. One illustration has been put up there for your edification and delight, but they are a whole area of study in themselves. The complete Harley Psalter has been put online by the British Library, while the complete Utrecht Psalter has also been put online by Utrecht University Library, so you can compare them for yourselves. Ain't modern technology wonderful - if only we could keep up with it.
  One day I will get on to putting some additional material on the website, but there is a lot of catching up to do first.

  Meanwhile, here is a little taster of God being carried by two cherubim tipping fire and ash on King David's enemies while angels shower them with arrows. Funny to think of monks singing about that in church in the spirit of Christian charity.

Bored with Gothic? Try This.

  This week's update to the graphics in Medieval Writing is for a script sample and paleography exercise of Beneventan script, as expressed in an 11th century Exultet Roll. It is quite fascinating for a number of reasons. First, the script is, like insular minuscule, one which defiantly held up its head and continued when all around were going Carolingian. Unlike insular minuscule, I find it hard to read, but maybe that's my smidgen of Irish ancestry coming in. The letter forms and ligatures that characterised the pre-Carolingian scripts of Europe have become very loopy and mannered. Looks pretty but is a bit hard to untangle, unlike the logical structure of insular minuscule. Can I say that without starting a pre-Carolingian script war?

  The second interesting feature is the form of the manuscript, which is unlike anything in the Anglo-French medieval tradition. Yes, they had rolls for various purposes, but the exultet rolls from Italy were designed in a unique form for a particular purpose. They were the text for the deacon to sing at the Easter ceremony for the consecration of the Paschal candle. The roll was placed over the lectern, so the audience could see the relevant pictures as the deacon sang the passages. Does this drop us a hint at the capacity, or lack thereof, of the laity to actually understand church Latin in the wild? This means that the pictures were upside down in relation to the text, and slightly offset from the particular passage. I think that makes it a kind of medieval Powerpoint presentation.
  The text addresses the usual concerns of Easter, the major church feast of the medieval calendar. A particularly delightful touch is the song of praise for the bees which made the wax for the Paschal candles, accompanied by a rural scene of beekeeping. Nice to think of insects getting a bit of medieval love.
  The other fabulous thing about this example is that the British Library has digitised the entire manuscript here. Once you have a handle on the script, it is well worthwhile to have a lingering examination of the whole thing. Just wish the British Library had put a 180 deg. revolve button on their images so we didn't have to keep standing on our heads in front of the computer screen to see the images properly. Hey, British Library, we love what you are doing these days, and we appreciate your letting us use the results.
  I realised when I was doing this update that I had intended years ago to include an example of early Beneventan or Lombardic. Must see if I can find one with a spiffy colour graphic, rather than the grungy old scan from an ancient paleography book that I had earmarked. All these lovely new resources make for more work, but we are all loving it.

Irish Gospels

  The task of updating graphic in Medieval Writing grinds relentlessly on as a result of the generosity of the British Library in making their colour images available for mere mortals like me to use. The latest update is an example of insular minuscule from the 12th century Irish Gospels of Maelbrigte. The sample includes a nifty initial with beasties and comes with a script example and paleography exercise.
  The passage is one of my favourites from the Vulgate Bible, the beginning of the Gospel of St John. I guess I like it because it seems to be a massive word play in which sentences and phrases hook together like links in a chain, repeating something of the previous expression while introducing a new concept, which is in turn linked back. This is unusual as the structure of the gospels texts is generally plain narrative, although John does have some repeating tag lines for emphasis, like the one which appears in the King James version as "Verily I say unto you ..." I just wonder how this particular passage got there and why.
  Insular minuscule is also my favourite script, partly because of its uniqueness and elegance, and partly because it proudly flew its flag for centuries when all of continental Europe was going all boring and Carolingian. OK, some folks say that makes it hard to read, but it isn't really. It just has its own code. It's really quite consistent and logical within itself. Enjoy it.

Colophons and Marginalia and All That

  I love beautiful medieval illuminations as much as the next time travelling aesthete, but I have always had a fascination for the words. Perhaps even more interesting than the words of the main text, which earnest scholars have translated, edited and argued over for decades, are the extra words which scribes have added in margins, between lines, on flyleaves and at the ends of texts. The little personal prayers that are added into blank spaces in professionally produced books of hours add individuality, even if they are scratched on to the page in less than calligraphic style. They can give you a little peek at how the book was used and regarded by the folks who owned it, wrote it or read it hundreds of years ago.
  This has become something of a fashion in paleographical and codicological studies these days. Scholarly tomes have been written on the subject and there is a website, Annotated Books Online, which provides digital facsimiles of mostly early printed books with handwritten annotations.
  This is why I used the colophon from the Lindisfarne Gospels as an example of insular minuscule writing in Medieval Writing. The graphics for that exercise have now been upgraded courtesy of downloaded colour images from the British Library, where all pages of that historic work are now online.

  So why did Aldred, scribe of the gloss, describe himself as an unworthy and most miserable priest? Was it a polite conventionality, or was he truly in awe of the mighty work which had been produced a couple of centuries before? Can you imagine him standing before the abbot jabbering, "What! You want me to write all over this! Are you kidding? Oh dear Lord I am so miserable and unworthy." OK, so I am getting a little imaginative here, but somehow it makes it all a little more human.

Updated Graphics - Again

  Some years ago, when the British Library put up their Turning the Pages digital display for a few of their very finest treasures, I discovered that there were people who thought that the Lindisfarne Gospels was a picture book and that it contained about seventeen pages. I guess my interest in paleography grew partly out of a passion for the words in books. Medieval manuscripts, for all the elegance and beauty of their illustrations in many cases, are still verbal narratives. 
   But they can still look gorgeous. I have updated the images in Medieval Writing for the script example and paleography exercise for the insular half uncial of the Lindisfarne Gospels with new colour images courtesy of the British Library, which now has a full digital facsimile with no turning pages, but all of them displayed.
  While my wee sample is basically about the letter forms, nonetheless the spiffy dragon initial looks awesome in living colour.

More Updated Graphics - Rustic Capitals

  Creeping along updating some of the Medieval Writing graphics with fancy colour images downloaded from the British Library, we now have amazingly improved visuals for rustic capitals script. The page is unusual in that it uses this script, more commonly used for headings, for the whole page, and there are some unusual features of script formatting. While mostly they just wrote in horizontal lines in more or less continuous form, sometimes the scribes just cut loose. Check out the paleography exercise to see what I mean.

Online Paleography

  I have just done one of my all too infrequent updates on the Paleography Links page of Medieval Writing. Unfortunately there seem to be more sites that have disappeared than new ones appearing. Spain and Italy in particular seem to have virtually disappeared off the paleography map. Some of the survivors are also looking a little elderly and forgotten as well. It has been pointed out before that production of online material has never been given its full regard in academic circles, and many working academics have abandoned their projects to get on with the dreaded peer reviewed olde worlde steam driven print publications in order to survive and progress.
  It is kind of flattering to find Medieval Writing at the top of some lists of paleographical resources, but a little alarming as I am not actually a professional paleographer, more a new media facilitator with an education, and I have not been able to update the site at anything like the speed I would like to. There is much weeping and wailing about the lack of interest by governments in the promotion of the humanities, but providing good quality resources for them in the media where everybody plays these days is probably a better bet than anything that governments can do.
  The latest development in manuscript studies in the media seems to involve the ever increasing provision by libraries and archives of digital facsimiles which are freely available for anyone to use. This is a wonderful thing and to be applauded mightily. Check out Sexy Codicology to find out where to find them all. Cheers to Giulio, the busiest man on the medieval internet.
  Perhaps when we have all stopped drooling over the pretty pictures that we have not been able to admire before, interest may be revived in discovering what these manuscripts are all about, and that involves being able to read them. Sure, there are intricate and erudite studies being produced in English literature departments, but they surely have a broader appeal to those interested in our history.
  OK, now which one of you pinched the steps to my soapbox? I want to get down now.

Addendum: A couple of links on Spanish paleography have been added. Thanks to Ainoa Castro ‏@ainoa_castro on Twitter.

A Leetle Progress

  The images on another British Library manuscript in Medieval Writing have been updated, courtesy of their wonderful website. These include examples of uncial and insular minuscule scripts, and a paleography exercise. It is now seven o'clock in the evening and 37 deg. C., so I think I will now sit down in the bath with a cold beer and a warm sense of satisfaction. One has to set limited and realistic goals in this weather.

Painful Progress

  As promised, I am working, excruciatingly slowly, on replacing older graphics in Medieval Writing with better ones, with especial thanks to the British Library for allowing their high quality colour images to be freely used. Some of the images in the first paleography exercise for uncial script have now been updated. Unfortunately it makes some of the other old black and white bits and pieces in the exercise look even worse. Can't win.
  I will try to split my time between this project and my blockbuster epic Flickr project to not only display, but organise, my medieval photographs. That may take a day or two.

New Year's Resolution, Right

  Since trying to get my real life / cyberlife balance a bit more in synch, I can hopefully get back to a bit more medieval paleography and beaut stuff like that. I hereby promise that I will spend less time scrolling through amusing pictures of anthropomorphic rabbits and the like in digitised medieval manuscripts on Twitter, and more time on using some of these ever increasing resources to do something useful, if perhaps less entertaining.
  Making a start I have replaced one (Yes one, count it) old black and white British Library image of uncial script with a colour image downloaded from their website with the marvellous new provisions that you can play with it however you like. No bunnies or exquisite Virgins, but much more real and lifelike image of the text. I will proceed from here.
  Now I just have to think about what to do about those now grotty old Flash exercises with the crappy photographic reproduction. Do I just do them all over again with my antique version of Flash (which miraculously still actually works) or is there something easier and quicker? Suggestions gratefully received.
  Excelsior!

Gazumped!

  It had to happen. Some clever person out there has put medieval paleography exercises on to something more modern than ye olde PC. If you want to do your paleography exercises on your iPhone or iPad, there is now an app to do it. Check it out here.
  I'll just crawl back into my dinosaur cave, unless there are still a few old fogies out there whose eyesight is not amenable to medieval handwriting on a small screen. Congrats you guys at Leeds University.

Addendum: also available for Android from Google Play. Will do a review if I can get my head away from my phone for long enough.

Addendum again: sorry, no can do. Even my phone is too prehistoric. Slow down world!

Working Scripts for (Somewhat) Ordinary Books

  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.

Ever Wondered What Paleographers Do?

  Or for that matter why they do it. Here is a really nice summary, with beautiful eye candy manuscript pics.