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?
When I was a kid I used to play tennis at a suburban court. Next door was a huge back garden with an enormous mulberry tree. If we should happen to hit a ball over the fence, we would have to climb over to collect it. At certain seasons of the year, this process could be protracted, involving a diversion up the mulberry tree, which was ended when the old lady who lived there would open the back door and yell at us to clear off. She never seemed to do this straight away, but just when she figured we had probably had quite enough.
The latest addition to Medieval Writing is script sample for a very tiny,semi-cursive Gothic rotunda script, as used in a theological work for personal study. I continue on my merry path of tormenting you with horrible scripts of the kind that you probably won't find in paleography books, but you will find if you want to read things in the wild archives and libraries.
I have had this leaf for some time, and have used it on the website to show some of the interesting marginalia, but I hadn't tried using it for a script sample or a paleography exercise as it had me baffled. It purports to be from a work in praise of the Virgin Mary by one Richardus de Sancto Laurentio, about whom very little seems to be known, and I could not find a transcript or translation of his text anywhere. So why not just read it? Well, it is rather difficult, with a lot of abbreviations, but I was sure I was getting something totally confused as it appeared to be trying to say that the Virgin Mary was an almond tree on one side of the page, and a mulberry tree on the other. There was something I just didn't get.
Recently I discovered, not a transcript or a translation, but a complete digital facsimile of an incunabula version of the work on a library website in Germany, and all was revealed. The chapter from which my page was abstracted was all about comparing the Virgin to a hortus conclusus, an enclosed garden, and in the process identifying her with all the different plants therein. Very strange. The Virgin was an almond tree and a mulberry tree and Christ was its fruit.
And to think that in my tennis playing childish innocence, covering myself with red goo up a mulberry tree, I was participating in a spiritual experience with very uncomfortable resonances with the ritual cannibalism to which the medieval Catholic church was so devoted. Mulberries as host, bread as the body of Christ, red dribbles all down the shirt front. Scarey.
I will provide a limited paleography exercise for a segment of the page when my shaking nerves are restored, and I have nutted out what this crazy guy was on about.
