Oh for a Quill and Parchment

  I repeatedly grizzle about how those medieval manuscripts we love have lasted for hundreds of years, but our fancy newfangled computer files turn to custard in just a few. I have just upgraded the graphics and formatting of the script samples for humanistic minuscule on Medieval Writing, so that they actually bear a closer resemblance to the beautiful bits of medieval calligraphy that they represent. As computer technology steadily improves, we are getting somewhat closer to producing images that actually look like segments from medieval manuscripts.

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.