This is the kind of research I have been doing over the last few years, called quantitative paleography because it uses a high volume of verifiable data. Does a style of writing fit better in the early stages of a script, is it representative of the end of its life cycle, or perhaps rather somewhere in the middle age? To be able to answer this question one needs to know how the font in question developed over time. To know when a book was copied, one needs to investigate where in the timespan of a script the sample in question can be placed. To get that information one needs to do more – and this is where things start to get a bit more complicated. 1500. In other words, merely identifying the family of handwriting is not enough to pinpoint when precisely a book was made. 2 – Three medieval script families: St Gall, Stiftsbibliothek, 14 (9th century) Leiden, University Library, BPL 196 (12th century) London, British Library, Arundel 28 (13th century)ĭespite the fact that these three families are relatively easy to distinguish and identify, they were used for extensive periods of time: Caroline (nr. 2, sample 2), and Littera textualis or Gothic script (Fig. Take for example the three major script families from the medieval period: Caroline minuscule (Fig. Medieval script tells time, although usually not very precisely. But how do we find it? Welcome to the secretive world of handwritten letters from the Middle Ages. This information comes in extremely handy considering that the title page was not yet invented. If we forget, for a moment, that letters themselves convey meaning, these two levels of variation – choice of script and of its execution – comprise perhaps the greatest value: letters show us when a manuscript was made. Remarkably, this variation is still preserved in our modern notions of typefaces, which represent the families, and fonts, which express the variation within these families, for example concerning size (for their meaning, see here). In this wild party of letter shapes roughly two categories of variation can be observed: first, the shape of medieval letters differs because they belong to different script families and secondly, their precise execution varies because the scribes opted for a particular size, thickness, quality, and pen angle. He even wrote the names of the scripts next to the samples, in appealing golden letters, like a good businessman (more about advertisements from the medieval book world in this post). The blank back shows that the sheet was hanging on the wall, like a menu in a fast-food restaurant. 1 was produced by Herman Strepel and through it he shows off his expertise – and in a sense his merchandise – to customers who visited his shop. No surviving artefact underscores this point of variation better than advertisement sheets of commercial scribes. This is perhaps the most amazing experience of spending a day going through a pile of medieval books in the library: the immense variation in the manner in which the text is written on the parchment pages. Each one of us human beings writes differently and considering that medieval books were made before the invention of print, it follows that the scripts they carry show a great variety in execution styles. One of the fundamental things in a medieval book is letters – those symbols that fill up page after page and that make up meaning.
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