A current game in the medieval Twitterverse is to put up interesting things found on flyleaves and pastedowns on Friday under the hashtag #FlyleafFriday. My little contribution this week is a bit too lengthy and contains too much rumination for Twitter, so here is the story.
I once bought a scruffy, cut down flyleaf from a French book of hours containing prayers written in French.
It was purchased as an example of a late 15th or early 16th century Gothic cursive script in vernacular French. It has a certain formality in that it contains a rubric and a slightly scrappy illuminated capital.
No doubt pages from the original book of hours text are gracing various collections of pretty medieval things. There is a script sample and paleography exercise for this sample in Medieval Writing.
Some time later the same bookseller made me an offer I could not refuse and I acquired two similar pages from the same volume with the prayers written only on one side. On the blank side of one of them, an inscription in a circle had been added in a much later hand.
The book still had significance to somebody. There has to be a story there. The bookseller included with these some extra flyleaves from the same book, that were so little regarded by the collecting public that he gave them to me for free. These were two leaves with further prayers written in a quite elegant, but completely different script.
These were dated at the end to 1572.
There are a few things to think about here. Firstly, the book could never be regarded as finished until the last addendum had been added. The scribe or the bookseller did not prescribe the total content. Owners added their own contributions. Individual volumes were evidently valued by owners, probably successive generations of owners, for a long time after the huge wave of popularity of books of hours in the 14th, 15th and early 16th centuries. Private devotions presumably did not always follow officially sanctioned religious fashion. Grandmere's old book of hours still provided solace and consolation for somebody.
Finally, it is intriguing that in the modern collecting marketplace, these parts of the book should be considered valueless discards. In some ways they provide a closer bond to the book's former owners than the officially prescribed text. OK, it was probably falling to bits. It certainly looks that way, rather than having been cut up, but to me these are at least as interesting as the rest.
I have a few scraps in my medieval detritus collection with personalised addenda and I thought at one stage it might be good to write an article about them. Then I discovered that a much more revered academic had written a whole book on this subject: Eamon Duffy 2006 Marking the Hours Yale University Press. It's a fascinating exposition of medieval people's relationships with their books.
The most recent addition to the site is a script sample of 15th century French cursive. Only trouble is, the document has been used for centuries as a parchment book cover and is in horrible condition and incomplete. This is good practice for looking at mucky old documents in archives rather than exquisite paleography samples in books.
For some reason I am always fascinated by recycled scraps. You always feel you have discovered something, even if you can't work out what it is exactly, and you do wonder why it got thrown away in the first place.
When printed books came in there was probably the same sort of handwringing angst that there is right now about e-books (No, please don't start on that one again!), and the work of many scribes was recycled into book covers and pastedowns and wrappers and heaven knows what else. The kinds of books most likely to turn up in this context were liturgical works and law texts, as the printed versions which replaced them were all identical and were not supposed to have any mistakes. You see, the great advantage of printing was not so much ease of production, as it was a very cumbersome process if somewhat faster than handwriting, but content control.
So it is a bit intriguing to find an old deed in the recycling bin. Families have held on to these things for centuries on the basis that they are heirlooms, and you never know, they might still entitle you to something. I saw an Elizabethan document the other day from a family collection that was signed by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Cool! I guess families die out, or become so impecunious that they have to sell their useless old deeds for bookwrappers.
What this website needs is a few little French things Patsy. Saffy, pop down and get us a few little French things sweetie!
No seriously, Medieval Writing needs a few more French things, so I have started with a script sample from a 14th century letter close of Jean le Bon in French Secretary cursive script. I have not done the paleography exercise yet, but will do it soon as it is just a wee little document. Much more fun than sorting out notes and backing up files.
I have just noted that the Dirty Books article mentioned a couple of posts ago has had its illustrations restored, in a natty format so they zoom out of the page at you when you click on them, so you can see the grubby finger marks, as well as the beautiful manuscripts that they were left on.
Oh, and about the mulberry tree. Well I will get back to that, but I'm afraid that manuscript has a rather similar effect on me as the consumption of gross excesses of mulberries. I will endeavour to finish the exercise though, imperfect as it may be. I just have a bit of a problem with all that horticultural and gynaecological imagery all mixed together.
OK, I promised I would sneak a little something in. There is a set of new script samples of cursive writing from the 14th and 15th centuries, as found in monastic pressmarks, basically inscriptions in books as to where they are stored in the library. These are interesting on a few counts. They show the diversity of cursive hands, but they also show something of medieval monastic library practice, and they point out avenues which have been used by researchers for discovering the history of books.
I have made some minor changes to the frame structure of the site, and before you say you hate it anyway and I should throw it out, I might point out that it is only there so that I can do some of these reorganisings when certain sections get overloaded, as I only have to change the navigation frame, not umpty gazillion pages. The script index now has its own section, as that is what a lot of people use the most, and it is getting kind of large. The navigation frame is wider, as I figure you have all got wider screens than the one that it was originally designed for. If the site comes up looking really weird next time you load it, just try clearing your cache so that everything fits again. If your favourite section has somehow got lost in the wash, please let me know.
On Medieval Writing I had originally intended to produce a broad outline of the history of scripts and their classification, and then zoom in on specific areas to explain them in more detail. However, while there are broad chronological and geographical trends in the history of handwriting styles, variation is really on a continuum. The closer you look, the more the concept of distinctive named classes of handwriting seems to be an illusion.
Paleography is a subject of many detailed expertises, and researchers may develop elaborate classificatory schemes within their own area of expertise, be it the insular minuscule family, Gothic book hands or the varieties of what used to be called English court hand. Such writers may then dismiss the rest of the literate world in very broad classificatory strokes. Furthermore, even the experts do not necessarily agree on the terminology within their own specialities.
Another problem is that certain geographical areas or types of writing have been heavily studied and written about, while others are known only to the most esoteric of experts. For example, how did they write in medieval Poland or Hungary or Bohemia? I seem to be doing most of my research on Spanish paleography on eBay!
I'm not quite sure how to attack this problem on the website, especially in relation to the development of cursive hands of the later middle ages. Nevertheless, hopefully there will be some valiant attempts as I try to make sense of the mounds of original handwritings and photographic reproductions that are piled in my study. The results my be quite radical.
