#manuscript funtimes

[shredsandpatches]

Tomorrow a bunch of prospective English lit grad students are coming in, which means I have an opportunity to bring out our facsimile of the Gough map, a map of Great Britain that dates to sometime in the fourteenth century (there's a lot of debate over exactly when) and which is the earliest English map to show the coastline in any sort of accurate detail. Mostly.

Because whenever this map was made, it was at a time when the English had a good sense of English and Welsh geography. They weren't so up on Scottish geography, so the Scottish coastline just sort of looks, you know, round.

It is also important to know that, while this is not a theologically-based map in the classic T-O style, like many medieval European maps it is oriented towards Jerusalem, meaning that the top of the map does not point north, as modern maps typically do, but rather east.

All of this combines to achieve a rather amusing effect. Here's what the Gough map looks like.

Yeah.

[shredsandpatches]

Manuscript librarian in the house! Regarding textualis and bastarda hands: medieval scripts (just like modern typography) tend to be used for different types of texts. This is particularly the case by the later Middle Ages though it's always true to at least an extent. There were varying levels of formality: a textualis script is called that because it was the kind of script you'd use for a biblical manuscript (if you're a medieval European the Bible is, of course, the text). There are also different levels of formality under the textualis umbrella: if you're looking at Northern European hands, it's generally the case that the straighter and pointier a script is, the more formal it is. It's more effort-intensive because you have to lift the pen more often and take more care with your pen strokes (and more pen strokes are required in formal hands).

On the other hand, if you're writing something that's more quick and dirty, like if you're a student copying out a university text for personal use or something like that, you're probably going to be writing in a cursive hand, which is so called from the Latin currere 'to run.' The major feature of cursive hands is that you don't have to lift the pen as much.

Bastarda scripts are called that because they combine features of the 'noble' textualis with the 'base' cursive. What can I say, medieval society was really classist. There's a similar hand called hybrida which is basically the same type of thing except that the features taken from textualis vs. cursive are different from the ones in bastarda scripts. In any event both of them are commonly used for literary texts, particularly in the vernacular, as well as non-biblical devotional texts. They're also related to the style of script used for government docs in the very late Middle Ages but that's a different kettle of fish entirely.

looking around your posts, I can notice most of the manuscripts were written using a common font, do you have a clue what type of font it may be?

many of the manuscripts i post are written in a script called "bastarda" (here's a link to the german wikipedia article bc it includes more reference pictures than the english one). another common one is called "textura" or "textualis" (link). they both fall under the umbrella category of "blackletter" (link).

i know close to nothing about calligraphy though! if you want to ask more specific question, at the top of my head i would direct you to @theshitpostcalligrapher or @menciemeer :)

[tsuzukerukoto]

@apotelesmati -- for Eli! Andersen's epic wacky funtime character assessments! -- Accepting

“Tch. Hm? Don’t misunderstand, I wasn’t angry at you! I was just trying to imagine you as the hero (勇者) in an adventure travelogue as part of a writing exercise, and nothing came to mind. That's what frustrated me. It seems that that is not a character setting you’re suited for. You may have a good nature that raises the reader's spirits and calms those around you, but rather than the plucky protagonist, the mage near the main character is the role I'd assign to you. Someone not directly in the spotlight, but adjacent to it. For one, you would be able to assist in the exposition, thanks to your interest in knights and knowledge of the arcane... Actually, speaking of arcane, how much longer are you going to break the rules without even knowing?! The believably of the setting has to be maintained! Eh? I'm getting a message from a shady, flowery magus that the rules being broken has always been a rule on its own... Bah! So be it. It is what it is."

"Anyway, I'm the wrong writer to put this to paper, it would become a part of the tragedy genre faster than a miswritten manuscript is tossed into the dustbin. The author you should be talking to is someone different. I'll consider this a free consultation, so let me procrasti-- get back to my other work."