Medieval Documents

  I have just put up a brief section on the website on Dealing with Medieval Documents. This is in response to a steady trickle of emails that I get about the reading of such documents. It is aimed at the beginner in the field, so if you are already calendaring the medieval archives of Lord Poodlewumpus or researching a new theory on 14th century Lithuanian diplomatic, you don't need to read it. It is my first little step into the new year updates. I will get back to the dull but worthy job of updating the graphics and formatting soon. And I must fossick out something interesting from my collection of medieval detritus to add something new to the site. Oh yeah, and I have to get back the the mulberries. Rats!

Back, or Forward, to Hieroglyphics

  Many years ago when multimedia was a novelty and the world was young and innocent, twelve year old multimedia designers told us that the written word, in terms of alphabetic spelling, was going to become extinct. We were told that the more intuitive mode of communication for hypertext links and task initiation was in the use of graphic symbols; pictograms or ideograms, although young multimedia designers were unfamiliar with these terminologies. They called them graphic hot links back then.
   As a middle aged fogey back then, as opposed to the geriatric fogey that I am now, I begged to differ. After all, what is so intuitive about a quasi-3D button on a 2D screen and what is so intuitive about doing everything by pressing buttons anyway? My granddaughters would not understand this now, and their opposable thumbs are developing whole new skills and functions. I compromised and wrote captions on my buttons in my alphabetic dogmatism.
   Nonetheless, I fail to see what is so intuitive about a picture of a rabbit running across the bottom of the screen as a navigation symbol for the next page, or about a cartoon dog fetching items from a letterbox as an email link. Furthermore, the use of graphics shaped like electrical switches is not intuitive, it is merely utilising learned symbolic communication from older technology. Besides, I can never work out which is on or off anyway since they changed real switches from little levers that pointed up or down to rocker switches with a vertical line and a circle on them. These are ideograms in their own right, but not particularly intuitive.
   I think it was because the web started off as a text based medium that restored text links to respectability, even though it is now filled with everything that whistles and sings. Drop down menus had words on them, even if menu shortcut bars had symbols on them. We went back to believing in alphabetic writing for a while.
   I have noticed a recent return to graphic symbolism, but the symbols have become even more simplified and abstract. Gmail now has strange little monochrome graphics instead of headings that say "trash", "archive" or "label". I have to hover the mouse over them to make the words come up in order to know which is which. My antique Kindle (nearly a year old!) has real buttons which say "menu" and "home" and the like, while my husband's new one has buttons with strange little symbols which all look like little geometric grids, indistinguishable one from the other without a good light and reading glasses. We are going back to pictograms, but they do not have the essential characteristic of being readily distinguishable.
   Intriguingly, as technologies change, the pictograms themselves are becoming increasingly abstracted. The standard graphic symbol for "save", for example, is a picture of a floppy disk, which many younger users of computers may never have even seen. The pictogram of a floppy disk has transformed into an ideogram for saving a file to whatever medium is being used. The garbage can symbol for trash is well recognised, but I always used to panic when using a Macintosh because to eject a removable medium, you had to drag it to the trash. The learning part of my brain recognised this as merely a process, while the intuitive part always panicked that I was trashing the contents of the medium and my files would all disappear. Mind you, with Windows I had a mental problem with clicking the "start" button to turn it off, but they have fixed this now as the button has no misleading captions, just that annoying little quadripartite flag, which is neither informative nor intuitive but merely an arrogant brand recognition symbol. Is this simplifying onscreen communication, or making the language of the process more complex and subtle?
  On other technological gizmos, real live buttons are no longer the simple analogue for binary function that they used to be. Gadgets get smaller, so rather than fill up space with loads of buttons, a few buttons perform different functions when used in different combinations. To remember how to work these permutations and combinations we have to read the manual. Back to ye olde alphabetic writing again, and yet I remember when it was considered that operating manuals, whether for gadgets or computer software, should be quite unnecessary. The more graphic and intuitive it gets, the more we need the words. 
   Old books about writing put these various schemes on a timeline of increasing conceptual complexity; pictograms, ideograms then alphabetic writing. We are actually using a combination of all three today, which some would say is the death of proper writing, but I think may represent a whole new complex of mental decoding of symbolic language.
   So why am I rabbiting on about this stuff right now? Well, just to keep you amused and to deflect attention from the fact that updates to Medieval Writing may be a few weeks off yet, as we are in school holidays down here and that means extensive visits from granddaughters, and besides, I am just in the process of buying a new fishing kayak.

A Blogological Mystery

  One of the strangest things about this blog is that the most read post by a country mile is a simple Christmas greeting I put up last year, which included the information that I had fixed a problem in the font size of some older postings. Now why do so many people want to read that?
   I can understand the passion about oak gall ink. After all, that is a topic to set anybody's pants on fire. A grumpy sneer at the wannabe English aristocracy is bound to be either mildly amusing or irritating to a number of people. I hope all the folks who tuned in to read about dirty medieval books were not disappointed that it was about greasy finger marks. And it is intriguing that people seem to be still reading an old posting from ages ago about shorthand. The disappearance of paleography from the English academic scene may be of interest to educational curmudgeons like myself. And there are always people interested in antique writing technology.
  Anyway, this is just a Christmas greeting. Merry Christmas, and best wishes for whatever seasonal festivities you celebrate in your part of the world among your people. My New Year's resolution is to finish all the technical updates to Medieval Writing, not to mention tidying up unfinished sections, and to provide some groovy new goodies. I will, truly. Next year.

Who Spotted My Deliberate Mistake?

  After receiving an email from somebody who wanted some information about Charlemagne's monogram, I discovered that I had left out a piece of the transcription in the paleography exercise of a Carolingian diploma, and nobody has told me about it. I'm sure you were all too polite to mention it, rather than never noticed.
  For all those quill pen freaks out there, I have put a little picture of a page where the pen went wrong in the Quill Pen section. Just a triviality to show that medieval manuscripts were not all perfect.
  And I'm still formatting and tidying up stuff.

Hurray for Brewster

   I have grumped before about the ephemeral nature of the web, and now I am going to grump again. I have just upgraded the graphics and formatting for the script samples for formal diplomatic hands, most of which are papal documents. I had not gone into these in great detail as the Vatican Secret Archives website used to have a really good, extensive section on The Diplomatics of Papal Documents. It has apparently disappeared. It can be found on The Internet Archive here, so all is not lost.

   I can understand that some older web material might look a bit olde worlde after a few years. After all, that is why I am upgrading my own stuff. Some material is ephemeral or topical by nature. But when somebody (or somebodies) has taken the trouble to produce work which is of enduring interest, even if minority interest, and of educational value, and otherwise hard to come by, and very attractive to boot, why would you just remove it? I mean, when a paper book exhausts its print run, the existing books are still out there. When a website is gone it is gone. Well it would be, were it not for Brewster and The Internet Archive. May he and his mighty project live forever.

Authentic Fakery

  Every so often I get an email from somebody who wants to buy, or has bought, a bit of medieval memorabilia on eBay and wants to know whether they are getting good value. Note that I do not answer these queries; that is, I answer the emails but not the question. Everybody has their own idea of good value, and I am not a qualified valuer. Besides, I just might be bidding against them. One writer did once venture the opinion that all medieval manuscripts on eBay were fake. I could not imagine who would take the trouble to produce an authentic looking piece of medieval manuscript fakery for the sort of money that they generally get on eBay. There are 19th century calligraphic pieces in medieval style, but if it looks like a duck and quacks ........
  An item currently for sale has me intrigued. It is a carved and gilded book cover which is advertised as being a modern fake in 15th century style, produced by a well known forger in Siena. It seems that, so far, nobody wants to buy it. Is it because, the object having been identified as a fake, that it is difficult to identify or authenticate that it is the particular fake that it is purported to be? A quick google around art auction websites suggests that fake book covers by this particular forger can fetch several thousand English pounds. He apparently produced a lot of book covers based on some in the city archives in Siena. A known fake painting by the artist was sold to over twenty thousand pounds.
  So what is an authentic fake? Does a fake eventually generate its own authenticity? Is a fake of less value if you cannot authenticate the identity of the faker?
  Meanwhile, back at the coal face, the update to graphics and formatting of the script samples of all Gothic book hands is complete and I am about to start on the document hands. Yippee!

Rejected, Discarded, Forgotten

  Have you checked out the blog Forgotten Bookmarks? It's all about the odd things that people leave in secondhand books. If you have ever bought secondhand books, you have probably found some yourself: restaurant menus, newspaper clippings, postcards, notes and annotations. They are little stories in themselves.
  I found a very unfortunate one the other day, while sorting for the monster secondhand book fair. It was in a guide to writing fiction, the book itself inscribed from one female person to another with "Follow your dreams". The insert was a publisher's rejection letter. It seems the would-be author chucked out the book, the letter and her dreams all together. Very sad.
  Have you ever wondered what happened to failed medieval authors? Did they just quietly starve, or get themselves a desk job in the town guild or the chancery? How did you get to be an author anyway, apart from getting yourself locked away for a number of years by your country's enemies in a reasonably comfortable prison with nothing to do? For every Geoffrey Chaucer or Thomas Hoccleve, were there dozens of government scribes whose colleagues ducked out to the privy when they saw them approaching with yet another manuscript in their hands? For every William of Malmesbury or Matthew Paris, were there dozens of monks being ordered to stop scribbling and get to choir immediately? We only have winner's history, even in the literary area.
  Upgrades to the scripts in Medieval Writing have got as far as Gothic bastarda. Sounds promising, but that is only the book scripts.

Right Royal Books

  I have just received an email suggesting that I remind you all about the exhibition of manuscripts from the Royal collection at the British Library. This exhibition will display some of their splendiferous treasures from one of their oldest, and most prestigious, collections. The British Library website has an announcement for the exhibition here. There is not much information at that site yet, but presumably there will be more when the exhibition opens in November. There has also been a continuing series of postings on the exhibition, the collections and the associated activities on the British Library blog Medieval and Earlier Manuscripts. Let us hope that once the exhibition is underway, they are generous with what they put online, for those of us who cannot just pop over to London for the live event.

So Many Books!

  After five days of lugging books around and a week of entertaining two rampaging granddaughters, progress has resumed on updating the formatting and graphics in the script sample section of Medieval Writing. I am now into Gothic textura book hands. Wheeeeee!
  The book fair I was helping at is a truly amazing thing. It started many years ago in a modest way, and has grown continually, so now they can run two main fairs a year, and supply a number of smaller ones in other places, in an absolutely enormous building with over 200,000 books laid out on rows of tables. All books have been donated by the Canberra community. It is, I believe, the biggest book fair in Australia.
   The organisers of the fair are themselves somewhat perplexed by the continuing growth of the event, and are wondering just what will happen in the future. More books are being donated, and at the same time more books are being bought, but can it continue? Possibly some of the growth in donations can be attributed to the demographics of Canberra, a city that has been populated by young professional people who are now becoming older retired professional people. Many are probably at a downsizing stage, not to mention a departing stage.
   The buying public is still turning up to recycle the books, however, so reports of the demise of the printed book are currently a little premature. There are some interesting things to note. Fiction turns over at a great rate. I think more people actually buy books, then recycle them, rather than borrowing from libraries. Classic literary fiction does not sell all that well. Perhaps the free downloads of out of copyright material, or purchases for a few cents from Amazon of such works in Kindle format, are the making the first inroads in the e-book department. Then again, perhaps everybody is sick to death of Jane Austen. Personal prejudice there.
   I will be interested to see how the whole thing progresses over the next few years, I should get a close view, as I have been persuaded to continue helping by sorting and pricing dictionaries and thesauruses and the like. Now those are books where you still need to riffle the pages.

Slight break in Transmission

  Updates to Medieval Writing have hit a slight delay. Sometimes real life has a habit of interfering with the tranquility of virtual reality. You see, it started with a fire and explosion in a chemical factory. No really. Let me explain.
   The family medievalist, now he is retired, helps out at a charity called Lifeline which offers telephone counselling. He doesn't do that, but does help with their major fundraising effort, two gigantic secondhand book fairs each year. This involves sorting books for six months and then selling them over a three day fair, which is occurring next weekend.
   But there was a fire and explosion in a chemical factory in the suburb where the books are stored and nobody could get in for several days, so they couldn't move the books to the place where they sell them last weekend, when there are young and able bodied volunteers available to move and unpack them.  So they are having to move and unpack 200,000 books over the next few days with a team of aged retired warriors. I took pity and offered to help. Books are heavy you know. Maybe there is something in this e-book thing after all.
  Add to that the usual level of chaos in the family circle, and there might be a few little delays, but I will get back on the job. Sorry if this sounds like a "dog ate my homework" story. More updates coming eventually.

By Gode's Bludde, Forsooth!

  BSL, just when I thought Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog was the silliest medieval oriented thing on the web, I find out about this. I received an email from an anonymous private secretary to the Lord of Kinterbury requesting permission to link to my website if I would link in return to The Ancient and Medieval Honour Guild. Now Medieval Writing is entirely public and anybody can link to it. Feel free. But his Lordship's little effort is only accessible, apart from a few entry screens, to persons who can prove they are descended from medieval knights and who hold a manorial title such as Lord or Lady, and they are dedicated to the highest moral ideals of chivalry etc. Well, that last is a good thing, but I wonder whether it extends to chivalric attitudes to the descendants of jugglers and criminals, recent immigrants to Olde Englande and other diverse members of the human race.

   I mean, are they really still like that in England? I do remember when I was living there at some stage in the past there was talk about reform to the House of Lords, and a peer of the realm was arguing quite genuinely on TV that he was one of the people who should be leading the country because he had a hedge on his estate that dated to Anglo-Saxon times. They dutifully showed a picture of the hedge, and I couldn't believe my little Aussie ears.

  I suppose the private secretary didn't know he was writing to a lefty, pinko, socialist, republican Australian descended from miscellaneous bods who had fled their motherlands to live in a country where they were not subjected to anachronistic, feudal-descended attitudes. I answered him quite politely. I think.

  PS. In relation to recent postings on this blog, the header of said site is illustrated with a picture of some ye olde distressed parchment and a modern fountain pen which has leaked blobs all over it. I invite learned iconographic analysis of this imagery.

Boring Jobs and Bizarre Coincidences

   I am plodding resolutely through updating the formatting and graphics in the script samples section of Medieval Writing. This may drive me bonkers, but I guess it is a good thing to do. I have worked my way into the protogothic section. That still leaves an awful lot. There still seem to be plenty of people making use of the site, so it shouldn't look too aged and daggy (unlike its author). I have discovered that some of the examples that I put up fairly early in the piece not only have sad little graphics, but I was also still experimenting with how to present transcriptions and the like. I guess it will come out rather more consistent eventually. I have lots of new stuff to put up, but I am (currently) maintaining steely resolve to tidy up the backlog.
  An odd distraction came up during the week, when somebody in England sent me a picture of a page of a manuscript that they had had in their possession for twenty years or so to ask me some questions about it. It was a liturgical sheet on paper with musical notation in the form of German hufnagelschrift. The odd thing was that it seemed to be an exact match in every way with a leaf I had acquired only a few months ago from the USA; not identical of course - it was a manuscript - but identical in script, notation and every decorative detail. 

A bit of mine

  She emailed the dealer I had bought mine from, and he was equally sure that it was from the same manuscript as the one from which he had sold several leaves. There is nothing odd about the way manuscript leaves from the same book have fluttered around the world, having been split up and passed around at auction and through dealers. It does seem a large coincidence that they should be randomly reunited by email across the world.
  The conversation we had, which involved references to various German websites displaying liturgical manuscripts, was reminiscent of several others I have had in which people somehow want their treasures to be older than they seem to be, and then claim that they have got the oldest whatever-it-is in captivity. Now I think paleographical dating may be a tad overrated, but I do think you go on some sort of Occam's razor principle. Or in modern parlance, if it quacks like a duck, waddles like a duck and swims like a duck it probably is not a highly advanced pterodactyl. Just mentioning it in case you think you have the earliest whatsit in the world in your little bottom drawer.

Surging Forward into the Past

   Having spent a good deal of time rescanning old photos and reorganising my photographic collection of medieval manuscripts, I have begun the process of updating some of the more manky old photos in the script examples section of Medieval Writing, as well as reformatting, updating links and all that jazz. This will take some time, so be patient and we might get there in time for the next great leap in the digital revolution.
   However, there are a few points for users to note. If the photographs are larger and less compressed, they will take longer to load. If you are still running on a windup clockwork modem, please be patient. I cannot turn scans from black and white photographs in old books into living high definition technicolor. I cannot make the script in the photographs more legible than it is in the original manuscript. I cannot remove difficulties like flaws in the vellum, stains on the page, or writing visible from the other side of the page, nor should I try. These are the difficulties you encounter in the real live world of manuscripts.
   I am not going to rescan the sets of alphabet letters. I had a number of discussions with colleagues right at the beginning of the project about the use of alphabet sets. Personally I think people just carry them around and stick them under their pillow rather than use them effectively if they are available. That is why they are all on rollovers so you can't just print them as sets, not, as one correspondent suggested, that I think you might steal them. Hey, you can have them. They're yours. I actually think it works better to hunt for the letters in context, but I included the separate letters so as not to cause palpitations among the troops. But I'm not doing them again.
   Somewhere along the way I will get tired of all this reinventing, and sneak in some new stuff from the increasing piles around me. Meanwhile, have fun with it.

Literacy through Mouse or Quill?

  A few weeks ago there was a tiny flutter in the media as a "research" project was published that purported to show that children gain better written literacy when they learn to write with a pen, having to form the letters themselves, than when they type on a computer. The one little trouble with this piece of research was that it was backed by a company that makes pens. OK, calm down pen guys. Even those of us who do most of our composing on a keyboard still have plenty of use for pens. And yes, handwriting can be a very satisfying art. Platoons of calligraphers cannot be wrong.
   It is kind of intriguing to note that pens of the very sort I was obliged to write with in my school days are being sold today as calligraphy pens, not fountain pens as they were called in my youth. I think that name came from the way ink would cascade in fountains over your fingers, or your books and your lunch when they leaked in your bag. Very satisfying to write with, but I wonder if they have fixed that little anomaly.

   Way back in the 1980s, when typing text was just about all you could do on a computer, school teachers were going through a bit of a crisis in the teaching of literacy. They claimed that children got all traumatised if their written work was corrected, so they didn't. There is a generation out there that can barely spell or punctuate. It seemed impossible to convince most teachers to let the kids use these new computer thingies to type their compositions, because they could correct them and end up with clean copy. One teacher of my acquaintance who did use a computer this way claimed that the kids got huge satisfaction out of it, but in those olden days the one class computer had to be severely rationed among the class.
   Now that computers can do practically anything and kids wander round with thumb drives on tapes around their necks and every classroom has a smart board, the one thing they do not seem to do is use them for straightforward compositional writing. My granddaughter is a terrible speller, and she was amazed to discover that she could produce a perfect assignment by correcting the spelling on the screen. They can google, they can email, they can rip MP3s, they can edit photos, they can even produce beautifully formatted text work in amazing fonts with clip art, but they don't use the technology simply to help them spell or punctuate.
   In the middle ages they recognised that there was a difference between reading and writing literacy. There were people who could read but not write, like Charlemagne and many women. There were scribes who could painstakingly copy out letters and words without much comprehension. That is why they made so many mistakes.
   Today we demand high levels of competency at both aspects of literacy, so it would make sense to make use of all the tools at our disposal: pens for learning letter forms and wiring our brains for understanding them; computers for developing fluency, correcting mistakes and encouraging original composition. It couldn't possibly be the case that both sides of the debate could be right, could it? 

Medieval Recycling

  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.

Sing, Sing, Sing!

   There have been some roistering discussions on the subject of digitising books, but those of us in love with medieval manuscripts can only applaud the ever growing corpus of fully digitised manuscript material that is appearing. I mean, yes, we would love to be able to see and feel and pore over and smell the originals, but we can at least see a much greater sample these days from our own desktop. The e-Codices site from Switzerland is one of the most magnificent, and continually growing.
  Their most recent newsletter reveals a project that has taken this to another level. Musical Treasures from the Library of St Gall shows us some significant samples from a project on early church music. Notker Balbalus (840 -912) was an important composer of early church music, inventing certain musical forms. He is better known to historians as Notker the Stammerer, who wrote a life of Charlemagne. I don't know what it says about historians that he should be known forever by his affliction rather than as Notker the Magnificent Musical Composer.
  His work has been reconstructed by ploughing through various copies which are to be found on the e-Codices site, and having them recorded by the early music ensemble Ordo Virtutum. On the website you can see pages from the various manuscripts while listening to the music from those pages being sung. Fascinating for those of us untutored in early medieval musical notation who think neumes look like trails left by worms across the page. If you really like it you can buy the CD. There are links to all manner of other related materials.
  What makes this a second generation digital project is that not only is it a quite splendid multimedia presentation on the web, it was actually generated from material already displayed on the web. A few Anglophonic institutions which retain suspicious attitudes to anyone wanting to actually utilise images of their hoarded treasures would do well to take a look at this and ponder.
  And yes, I know that the limitations of early musical notation mean that we don't know if it actually sounded exactly like that, but it does bring the pages alive.

Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax

   Well, sealing wax anyway. I have been pottering around doing bits of housework on Medieval Writing, and decided the section on Seals needed a bit of jazzing up. It will be an ongoing process, but I have started.

   In relation to some ongoing discussions, I have discovered that the multiple volumes of the old catalogues of seals in the British Museum are now available on the Internet Archive, so it is getting easier to get hold of old books. I just have to remember to put "manuscripts" into the search terms, otherwise I get the catalogue of seals and whales from the natural history department. Doncha just love the English language?

Hard Drive, Catastrophe-Proof Bunker or Peat Bog?

   A couple of interesting items have appeared in the news this week relating to the interests of the people who frequent this blog. The first is that the Internet Archive is setting up a facility to preserve paper books that they have digitised. This relates to some issues covered in the posting Reprise on Google, e-Books, Copyright and All That Jazz. The idea is to have one copy of everything they can get their hands on, not for regular consultation, but as a "seed bank" if needed to check or resurrect digital copies. Take a look at the original article by Brewster Kahle Why Preserve Books? The New Physical Archive of the Internet Archive. There has already been considerable commentary on this posting and some on other blogs, some of it thoughtful, some of it a little nutty. I was slightly intrigued by the putative author who thought that archiving his book would be a breach of copyright. It's going to get a bit rough when authors come knocking on your door to see what you have done with their books.
   It was also of interest to note that the Internet Archive preserves old hard drives which contain digitised material, as well as microfilms. Somewhere along the line, I guess we will find out which of these media survives the best.
   The process was evidently inspired by hearing that some libraries were culling their collections after books had been digitised by Google. Now libraries have always culled, but I guess there might be a critical mass developing out there. It is about one good generation since a huge expansion in universities, and their libraries, and there is an ongoing expansion in the number of books, as well as journals, published. We are rarely presented with the definitive work on any subject these days. Decisions must be made about what to preserve and how to preserve it, and we all have our favourite causes. Trashing perfectly good old books always seems like murder. I mean, maybe everybody threw out their copy of A User's Guide to CP/M, like I did not so long ago.
   Meanwhile, in Dublin, the National Museum has just put on display an 8th century psalter found in a peat bog in 2006 and finally conserved so that it can be displayed. The museum has an article on the find and its conservation The Faddan More Psalter. Click on the PDF file link for more information on the conservation and some photographs. The Independent has an article about the item going on display Public gets first look at ancient book of psalms. Now while it seems that a peat bog is not the ideal conservation medium for ancient books, it is better than a damp cellar, inflammable library or bug ridden attic. The book is severely damaged, but it is still there and evidence for ancient Irish written culture. But why was it in a peat bog at all? Is it possible that it may have been culled from a monastic library centuries ago???
   There is a story that Gerald of Wales, the 12th century cleric and traveller through Britain's Celtic realms, saw the Book of Kells. He certainly saw and described an ancient book which he admired, but nothing about it suggests that it was the Books of Kells. Rare finds like this latest remind us that there were many wondrous things that have been lost.

The Writing of the Illiterate Lombards

  Right, I promised some more paleography, so here it is. As I have been discussing paleographical nomenclature recently, particularly with regard to the ill-named National Hands, I thought I would fill in a small hole by adding a script sample for a predecessor of, or an early form of, Beneventan minuscule of southern Italy. Some paleographers in the past have called this script Lombardic, even though the Lombards mainly hung out in the north of Italy and were probably illiterate. Others have called it snappy names like scriptura latina minuscula antiquior. It is mainly interesting for its horrendous ligatures. There is probably not a single example of it in captivity that has not already been transcribed by some erudite scholar, so don't panic. Just enjoy.

   On the ongoing ink discussion H. Doug Matsuoka has come up with something intriguing from the web as usual. Trouble is, I don't think that reference he has given us could be classified as a medieval ink recipe; more of a modern kitchens ink recipe. The vinegar in that is for dissolving steel wool into iron acetate salts and the tannic acid is derived from tea, not oak galls. Same underlying notion, but different methodology. However, his reference led me to Monastic Ink: linking chemistry and history which is a description of a high school science project to make iron gall ink, complete with some details of the underlying chemistry. I love the linkage here. Our high school science projects always seemed so abstract and tied to the laboratory rather than the outside world. Come to think of, so did my entire chemistry degree. In that article it is claimed that in the 16th century they started getting their iron salts by putting nails in sulphuric acid, so that is a bit closer to the steel wool method.

You Want Vinegar with Your Oak Galls?

   My attempts to tidy up my back office were recently interrupted by a verbose and apparently excitable correspondent who took exception to my suggestion that iron gall ink can turn brown over the centuries. Apparently I was not supposed to mention this because it doesn't start off brown. However, time and tide wait for no scribe. 
   He also objected to my mentioning the use of vinegar in the manufacture of iron gall ink because, basically, according to him, it wouldn't work for various reasons involving Ph and ion release and suchlike chemical stuff. Well, I have no practical knowledge of whether it works or not, and can only point to the transcriptions of various medieval ink recipes mentioning either vinegar or wine that have been published and say, well if it doesn't work, they wrote it down anyway. Check out Inks and Pigments and follow the external links.

Brown?

   An odd thing was that only a day or so previously I had received a request from somebody at the BBC who was making a program about oak forests and wanted to know if I would pop down to a bosky grove with them and whip up a batch of iron gall ink next week. I pointed out that I live in Australia and don't actually make my own ink. Apparently they found somebody more useful, so when the program appears, watch it and see if they use vinegar. It must be the oak gall harvesting season or something.
   The only thing that came out of this was that I discovered that a couple of links I had on the subject were out of date. Fixing these was the first work I had done on Medieval Writing in a couple of months, so I figure it is about time to do something about that. Some more paleography coming up soon.