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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

History of the Familiar

The latest addition to the website is The Strange History of Humanistic Minuscule. It is an odd thing that the form of medieval handwriting that is most familiar to us has a complex history that belies the notion that paleography is about changes to the shapes of letters. In this case, it is about changes to the nature of reading, even if the letters do not change that much and there are only very few absolute criteria that differentiate this family of scripts from what went before, and what continued in parallel with it.