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.

It's Gothic Jim, But Not As We Know It

 The Luttrell Psalter (British Library, Add. ms 42130) is famed in song and legend for its illustrations, containing elaborate historiated initials, scenes of English country life and work which might be considered typical if the 14th century hadn't been rife with Black Death, rotten weather, famine and peasants revolting, and some very weird part human, part animal creatures cavorting in the margins. It also contains the most pompous portrait of a patron and book owner ever painted, Geoffrey de Luttrell. Well, perhaps with the possible exception of the Duc de Berry graciously acknowledging St Peter as he enters heaven.

  Talk about establishing ownership. Galfridus Louterell, as he is designated here, liked to spread his armorials around.
  The Luttrell Psalter also contains writing, which seems to get forgotten at times. The script is a form of Gothic textura, although it doesn't have that diagonal interwoven quality that gives textura, or textualis, its name by comparison with the appearance of a woven textile. Instead it is very upright, incredibly precisely drawn, and some of the letters are finished straight and flat at the bottom, without feet, which was much harder for the scribe to do accurately. It therefore gets called Gothic textura prescissa, or even Gothic textura prescissa sine pedibus (without feet). This particular example also has very fiddly, but somewhat ugly, little curly scrolls added to the ends of some letters.

  The letters are all carefully separated and somehow, although the letter forms are essentially Gothic, it doesn't really look Gothic at all. It's not too hard to read, and there is a script sample and paleography exercise for it on Medieval Writing. The pretty and wacky pictures from the page are also there for your amusement, courtesy of the British Library website. You can now work your way through the whole manuscript there if you can navigate the search facility. Worth the trouble.

Beasties from the Bestiary

  Purely coincidentally, the last two script samples and paleography exercises for which I have updated the graphics in Medieval Writing (courtesy once again of the British Library's generous usage policies for their digital facsimiles) have been extracts from that wondrous medieval text known as the bestiary. The first (Royal 12 C xix) concerns the partridge, a bird which is painted with a very bad character. This is a nice example of protogothic/early Gothic, however you want to designate it. Because I now have access to the whole manuscript rather than just a small segment of the page, the displayed text and transcription has been extended. The full translation is still pending. I may have to give a bit of a rough guide rather than a translation, as the peculiarities of the bestiary text defeated even the family medievalist.

  The second (Harley 3244) concerns the elephant, a creature considered to be of much more moral character than the perfidious partridge. The script is a very small Gothic textura. The images of elephants, usually depicted with a castle full of soldiers on their back, are often grossly anatomically inaccurate, but this one is a pretty good representation of an elephant. It looks very like a depiction of the town band of Cremona as drawn by Matthew Paris, so perhaps, like Matthew Paris, the artist had actually seen as elephant or perhaps he took elephant drawing lessons from Matthew Paris. Suffice to say that everybody on board the elephant appears to be having a jolly old time and this has to be the best medieval party elephant ever.

  I adore bestiaries. The text is crazy and the images are delightful. In many ways the bestiary is the absolute prototype of a medieval text, if you exclude the liturgical texts which supposedly were reproduced accurately and consistently. The work comes in multitudinous variations, based on a core text, Physiologus, whoever or whatever he or that may have been. The text is confused, corrupted, with startling links to very ancient depictions of animals or mythical creatures in the ancient world. It has also been added to from various sources, including local familiar animals so that hedgehogs (dutifully carrying grapes on their spines) could share a page with gryphons or cockatrices.

  As far as natural history goes, the descriptions are bizarrely inaccurate, and they are overlaid with moral lessons. While the pictorial character of each creature may be reasonably consistent, and the general character of each animal follows a pattern, the precise text varies from manuscript to manuscript. There is no definitive text. This means you can't just google a transcript or translation of a section, like you can the Vulgate Bible. This is true of so much literature from the manuscript era. However, picking the text to pieces to try to find some authentic core in a reductionist mode is fruitless. Each example is an authentic witness to something somewhere. If a few creatures from Gerald of Wales appear occasionally, as they do, this is not an intrusion but a legitimate form of the text which meant something in a particular place and time.

  So enjoy the paleography lessons, then waste many happy hours poking through all the other amazing creatures of the bestiary. There are worse ways to spend a wet afternoon.

    I leave you to contemplate the battle between the crocodile and the hydrus (also Royal 12 C XIX), in which the crocodile swallows the hydrus but loses the bout because the hydrus gnaws his way out through his guts. The bestiary can be a bit savage at times.

Protogothic and Choking Lions

  For reasons which are not entirely clear, some members of the medieval Tweeting community use the hashtag #notalion to post pictures of medieval illustrations of lions that don't look like lions. Part of the culture of foolish recreational medievalia, I guess. One of my favourite #notalion images is in the form of a decorative initial that has a lion apparently choking on it while eating spinach.

  Which brings me to note that the graphics have been updated on the script sample and paleography exercise for a Continental protogothic script from the works of Suetonius in Medieval Writing, courtesy once again of the British Library image bank. And now that there is a colour illustration, it can be seen that the exercise has turned the lion quite green around the gills.
  Very easy paleography in this example. Good one to start on.

Medieval Cartoon Strip and Reader's Digest

  I think my very favourite English church is All Saints, North Street in York. Unusual design, sits down there by the river, sports an angel roof and at one time constantly reeked of incense. The greatest treasure of all is the collection of late medieval stained glass windows. Like most of their kind they have been moved, damaged, restored, jumbled, but they are still an amazing collection, and that in a town which has vitreous wonders dotted around it in many churches great and small.
  Some of the windows have less than common iconographic schemes, of which perhaps the most unique is the Pricke of Conscience window, illustrating an English language medieval poem about the last days of the world. This poem was once attributed to Richard Rolle of Hampole, but has since been re-assigned to that most prolific of English authors, Anon. It is a very, very long poem, and the window illustrates one short segment of it, listing the events of the last fifteen days of the world. It reads from left to right, bottom to top, like a strip cartoon.

    Two panels are in the wrong order for the poem, the second top right and the top left. This may have occurred during restoration of the glass at some time. The bottom row represents the donors of the window, praying for their own salvation. In the tracery lights St Peter leads the blessed to heaven and demons take the damned to hell, so get praying. Sorry, I don't have a good picture of those panels.
  So far we have the standard "lessons for the illiterate" paradigm, but it isn't quite so. Each panel has two lines of the poem written beneath it in chunky Gothic script. Some of these do not survive complete, but they were there. So it is not just a picture book, but a Reader's Digest; a potted summary of the most important lessons from a very long literary work that even the literate among the congregation may have found daunting to read in full. So this is how it goes.
  (Text from version by Richard Morris, 1863 from Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse - starts on p.129. As is apparent it doesn't match on every panel, so there must be variant texts, and the thorns have all been turned into th for easier typing. The spelling checker will now proceed to explode.)

  The first day of thas fiften days

  The se sal ryse, als the bukes says,

  Abowen the heght of ilka mountayne,

  Fully fourty cubyttes certayne,

  And in his stede even upstande,

  Als an heghe hil dus on the lande

  The secunde day, the se sal be swa law

  That unnethes men sal it knaw.

  The thred day, the se sal seme playn

  Ans stand even in his cours agayn

  Als it stode forst at the bygynnyng,

  With-outen mare rysing or fallyng.

  The fierth day, sal swilk a wonder be,

  the mast wondreful fisshes of the se

  Sal com to-geder and mak swilk romyng (roryng in another ms. Much better, roaring fishes.)

  That it sal be hydus til mans hering.

  Bot what that romiyng (roryng) sal signify,

  Na man may whit, bor God almyghty.

  The fift day, the se sal brynne

  And alle watters als thai sal rynne;

  And that sal last fra the son rysyng

  Til the tyme of the son doun gangyng.

  The sext day, sal spryng a blody dewe

  On grisse and tres, als it sal shewe.

  The sevend day byggyns doun sal falle

  And grete  castels, and tours with-alle.

  The eght day, hard roches and stanes

  Sal strik togyder, alle attanes.

  An ilkan of tham sal other doun cast,

  And ilkan agayn other hortel fast,

  Swa that ilka stan,on divers wyse,

  Sal sonder other in thre partyse.

  The neghend day, gret erthedyn sal be,

  Generaly in ilka contre;

  Ans swa gret erthdyn als sal be than

  Was never hard, sythen the world bygan.

  The tend day thar-aftir to neven,

  The erthe sal be made playn and even,

  For hilles and valeis sal turned be

  In-til playn, and made even to se.

  The ellevend day men sal com out

  Of caves, and holes and wend about,

  Als wode men, that na witt can;

  And nane sal spek til other than.

  The twelfte day aftir, the sternes alle

  And the signes fra the heven sal falle.

  The thredend day sal dede men banes

  Be sett to-gyder, and ryse al attanes,

  And aboven on thair graves stand; This sal byfalle in ilka land.

  Sal dighe, childe, man and woman

  For thai shalle with tham rys ogayn

  That byfor war dede, outher til ioy or payn.

  The fiftend day, thos sal betyde,

  Alle the world sal bryn on ilk syde,

  And the erthe whar we now duelle,

  Until the utter end of alle helle.

  So there you have it; the sea rising and falling, fish gathering and roaring, the sea burning, bloody dew, earthquakes with castles and towers falling, rocks breaking each other apart and the earth flattened, people crawling out of holes just in time to see the stars falling, the bones of dead people reassembled and then everyone dies so they can rise again, after the earth has been destroyed by fire. I guess they picked those lines for their marvellous pictorial possibilities. After all, a hundred pages or so on the sayings of the Anti-Christ just wouldn't have the same visual impact. Be very scared. Pray. Be good.

  What does it say about lay literacy? The words are there for the reading in the vernacular. It even has a bit of a northern twist to it. I can hear it in a Yorkshire accent. But the assumption seems to be that the written text must be extremely abbreviated and rendered visually. Narrative, yes, but not too many words.

  The church of All Saints, North Street has applied for a Heritage grant to restore and protect these windows for future generations. Check out all their news on their own website.

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.

Live Tweeting

  With the conference season apparently in full swing, 'tis the season to be tweeting. Conference organisers these days give instructions as to what hashtags to use and what the social politenesses are for each occasion. These tweetstreams can be fun and useful for those of us not able to actually be there and who would like a few clues as to what is going on without having to wait for the conference papers to be published.
  However, it does seem that there needs to be some courses on Live Tweeting 101 in order for us all to get the best out of it. Academics have spent years learning how to put in all the necessary apparatus to make a paper have respectable street cred, but they have often not practised the art of extreme summary. It's a good thing to do. Makes you think about what the point is rather than just how much corroborative evidence needs to be piled on to justify an opinion.

Twitterer from BL Royal 12 C XIX, f.52v

  So, some tips from someone who likes to read these things - sometimes.

1. Limit tweets to one every 10, 15 or 20 minutes. That gives the tweeter the chance to work out what the main point is, and doesn't completely overwhelm the tweetee's inbox with a rolling cascade, preventing them from reading the rest of their day's tweets.
2. Use minimal hashtags so as to leave some space to say something.
3. Please don't use excessive acronyms and abbreviations. Keep it to short plain English sentences. If you try to cram in too much by abbreviating, it is too much trouble to the reader to try and unscramble what you are talking about.
4. Remember you are talking to people who are not listening to the paper. In group allusions are a turn off.
5. The final result should be a four sentence summary of the main point and purpose of the paper, not an on-the-fly scrambled analysis or attempted dialectic.

  I blushingly confess I have unfollowed a couple of people who had interesting things to say on subjects that fascinate me because the jumbled cascade of live tweeted commentary made me feel under siege. Hey, I like the concept of live tweeting, it just has to be done really well.
  Many years ago, before Twitter was invented, the family medievalist tried the, then new and scarey, concept of bulletin board tutorials in which participants had to put down very brief thoughts on the weekly topic. After the initial panic subsided (At that time some students had never used a bulletin board.), the students discovered that being forced into brevity made them clarify their thoughts marvellously. They actually began to enjoy the exercise. Maybe those conference papers should be tweeted in the first place.
  Now live historical tweeting - that is good fun. But I guess that involves planning and you can have it all typed out ready to cut and paste it into tweets at the appropriate moment. Listening analytically and typing simultaneously, while keeping within the bounds of Twitter, is a new skill for all of us.

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.

Updated Graphics - Again

  Some years ago, when the British Library put up their Turning the Pages digital display for a few of their very finest treasures, I discovered that there were people who thought that the Lindisfarne Gospels was a picture book and that it contained about seventeen pages. I guess my interest in paleography grew partly out of a passion for the words in books. Medieval manuscripts, for all the elegance and beauty of their illustrations in many cases, are still verbal narratives. 
   But they can still look gorgeous. I have updated the images in Medieval Writing for the script example and paleography exercise for the insular half uncial of the Lindisfarne Gospels with new colour images courtesy of the British Library, which now has a full digital facsimile with no turning pages, but all of them displayed.
  While my wee sample is basically about the letter forms, nonetheless the spiffy dragon initial looks awesome in living colour.

Manuscripts and Stained Glass

  It may be giving me a split personality, but I have been dividing my medieval time (I do have other time!) between updating things, mainly links right now, on Medieval Writing and trying to organise my humungous photographic project on Flickr. I am battling my way through a whole swag of pictures of stained glass at the moment, which has prompted a few thoughts. Dangerous.
  The pictures were all taken under urban guerilla conditions, and so are not as detailed, perfect in colour, crispness and verticality as those ones which appear in beautiful art books, but they probably give a better impression of what people, medieval or other, actually saw. That leads to a few thoughts on their function. The traditional take on this is that they were essentially didactic, providing lessons to the illiterate. Hmmm.
  The first time I visited Chartres cathedral, I thought initially it must not be open to visitors as it was pitch dark inside. Then it became apparent that there were people in there, and my husband and myself were both mystified as to why there were no lights on. It was a very bright day outside and we had to stand for about 15 minutes until our eyes adjusted before we dared tackle navigating around. And then something extraordinary happened. The whole place just started to shimmer with colour, constantly changing as the light changed behind the heavily coloured 13th century windows. It looked nothing like a picture in a book, but one can only imagine the impression on the citizens of medieval Chartres, which was probably as dingy and smelly as most medieval cities outside the cloisters. Add all the colour and gold which has been scrubbed off the interiors of medieval churches in modern times and the whole impression must have been dark and colourful, shiny and aromatic, and alive; maybe a glimpse of Paradise.

  See, a photograph just doesn't do it. It just sits there. In the building, all the little figures and scenes tend to dissolve in a shimmer of moving colour. Of course, by the 15th century stained glass had got bigger and bolder and lighter and easier to resolve, but then the populace had become more literate as well.

  The illustrations in manuscript books are right there in front of the reader, able to be interpreted in all their complexity. For modern viewers, they have generally weathered the test of time better as well, not dissolving into confused fragments with repeated repairs to the windows. The owners of manuscript books were not, of course, the poor people, and probably at least a bit literate, even if the pictures were more informative to them than the black scratches on the pages.

  No doubt the windows were reminders of the lessons learned aurally, but somehow I just can't see the illiterate townsmen and women screwing up their eyes to try to follow the narrative sequences in tiny little roundels and matching up the types with the anti-types fifty feet above the floor. There just has to be a little mystery.

Updating Links Again

  I have just had another all too infrequent run through updating links, this time on the Complete Digital Facsimiles page of Medieval Writing. You know, I think Titivullus has got a new profession collecting error 404s. There's a thought for a medievalist cartoonist.
  I haven't attempted to duplicate the mighty collection now accessible through Sexy Codicology. Go there too and you will find more wonders.
  Think I'll have a little rest now and go back to processing pretty pictures of stained glass for my unlikely to ever end Flickr project.

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.

Online Paleography

  I have just done one of my all too infrequent updates on the Paleography Links page of Medieval Writing. Unfortunately there seem to be more sites that have disappeared than new ones appearing. Spain and Italy in particular seem to have virtually disappeared off the paleography map. Some of the survivors are also looking a little elderly and forgotten as well. It has been pointed out before that production of online material has never been given its full regard in academic circles, and many working academics have abandoned their projects to get on with the dreaded peer reviewed olde worlde steam driven print publications in order to survive and progress.
  It is kind of flattering to find Medieval Writing at the top of some lists of paleographical resources, but a little alarming as I am not actually a professional paleographer, more a new media facilitator with an education, and I have not been able to update the site at anything like the speed I would like to. There is much weeping and wailing about the lack of interest by governments in the promotion of the humanities, but providing good quality resources for them in the media where everybody plays these days is probably a better bet than anything that governments can do.
  The latest development in manuscript studies in the media seems to involve the ever increasing provision by libraries and archives of digital facsimiles which are freely available for anyone to use. This is a wonderful thing and to be applauded mightily. Check out Sexy Codicology to find out where to find them all. Cheers to Giulio, the busiest man on the medieval internet.
  Perhaps when we have all stopped drooling over the pretty pictures that we have not been able to admire before, interest may be revived in discovering what these manuscripts are all about, and that involves being able to read them. Sure, there are intricate and erudite studies being produced in English literature departments, but they surely have a broader appeal to those interested in our history.
  OK, now which one of you pinched the steps to my soapbox? I want to get down now.

Addendum: A couple of links on Spanish paleography have been added. Thanks to Ainoa Castro ‏@ainoa_castro on Twitter.

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.

It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

  We are sweltering in a long, long hot spell down here in Oz right now; too hot to be doing thinky things like paleography. So I have embarked on the Great Flickr Project to put all my medieval photographs somewhere in cyberspace, caption and annotate them, organise them into something coherent and useful, and perhaps revive some of my old projects on medieval visual culture. I mean, how hard is it? It's just a bit of digital image jiggerypokery, updating my ever so complete database, doing a bit of sorting and recataloguing, and lo and behold, I will have a smorgasbord of medieval feastery  to play with. Easy peasy.
  The photographs, mainly from Britain but also some from the Continent, were taken during the course of a number of extended visits over the years, but all in the days before digital photography was a goer. I had a reasonably good SLR kit, but it was really urban guerilla photography. Certain sites banned tripods and/or flash and sometimes you had to be pretty quick on your feet. I used slide film, so what was in the box was what was in the box.
  They have been digitised and databased over the years, so I know what they all are (mostly), but they are in totally random order, batched in folders of around 100 images because that was what you could put on a CD-ROM. Coherent sets of images are scattered all over the place, but that doesn't matter because I've got a database, you see.
  It's been great fun upgrading the quality of the images to compensate for having to take the original photographs in a variety of bodgy lighting conditions, trying to do long exposures by bracing myself against a pillar with my shoulders, with knees bent and elbows tucked in. I'm sure some church and castle visitors thought I was practising some strange antipodean form of yoga. But the results give some satisfaction. I can even correct those ones where I slightly lost my sense of verticality. Terrible temptation to sit fiddling with the digital dials to just get it a little bit better.
  Of course, the database isn't quite as comprehensive and detailed as it might be. That means some time spent googling around to get more information. The pictures were taken some years ago, and things have happened. Discovered to my horror that one church I had visited had completely burned out not long afterwards. A quick check of stats says I have over 5500 images in my database, not all of which are mine but mostly. I have currently uploaded 140 and used 0.00053% of my allowed 1 terabyte of Flickr. So far they are all of misericords and other bits of church woodwork. I gotta work faster!

  Meanwhile, does anybody recognise this dude? Not all databases are perfect. Check out here every so often and see how I'm getting along. Maybe the paleography would be easier after all.

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.

Little Scribal Thingamajig

    We all love our little medieval depictions of scribes. Somehow it connects us to the letters they wrote on those dead sheep and cows. I recently received an email from one Bob Green of London with a link to a depiction of a scribe in an unusual medium. At least, it's an unusual medium to be surviving today, being a small metal object that was found through metal detecting. People did lose the oddest things in the past.
  Take a look at it here. Objects like this not only show us what scribes looked like or what equipment they used, they give a hint at the value of the work they did. I'm not expecting anyone to commemorate anything I do in silver gilt any time soon.
  Thanks for sharing that with us Bob.