The paleographical world (small though it is) is at the beginning of what could be a major crisis. Paleography is the study of old handwriting: without paleographers analyzing old handwriting, it would be impossible for us to read handwritten texts from any earlier era. I have seen entire academic arguments fail because they were based on a poor analysis of handwriting: our knowledge of the past really does depend on our ability to read texts, and we can’t read texts without the help of paleographers.

But paleography is about to lose its support from academia, as explained in a letter by Jeffrey Hamburger (one of the pre-eminent scholars of medieval manuscripts):

“King’s College London is undertaking what they call ‘strategic disinvestment’ and have informed our colleague, David Ganz, on Tuesday that funding for the Chair in Palaeography will cease from 31 August this year, when David will be out of a job. This is part of a wider context whereby all academic staff in the School of Arts and Humanities at King’s have to re-apply for their own jobs before the 1st March. They think this the “most humane way” of losing 22 academic posts.”

Medieval scholars are rallying to prevent this from happening. There are lots of things you can do to help!

• Join the Facebook group
• Sign the petition
• Write letters (on paper, in your own illegible handwriting!) to Professor Rick Trainor, The Principal, King’s College, The Strand, London WC2R 2LS and copy to Professor Jan Palmowski, Head of the School of Arts and Humanities.

Now that Christmas is over, I can finally tell you what I’ve been working on for the past nine months! I have made some hints over the past few months, but I couldn’t say too much because it was a Christmas present, and it needed to be kept quite secret lest the intended recipient learn about it.

So, here it is (click on the pictures to see larger versions):

Ta Da! It is a reproduction, front and back, of a folio of the Ellesmere Chaucer, one of the most important and famous surviving manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. It is the first page of the Clerk’s Tale, folio 88.

I stove to be as absolutely authentic as possible in creating this reproduction. I spent weeks studying and practicing the Anglicana script of the original scribe to get my handwriting as close to his as possible. The reproduction is on calfskin vellum. I was going to use iron gall ink, but the ink of the original manuscript is quite brown, so I used walnut ink instead because that made it easier for me to match the color. I used 22-karat gold leaf and gesso based on a medieval formula. I even reproduced some of the imperfections of the original: the top of the page has been cropped, cutting off some of the decorative border, and there are smudges in a few places.

I kept pretty careful documentation of the entire process – probably more information than anybody really wants to know. But if you’re interested, here are links to all of it:

• My blog posts about the process, including pictures of the work in progress
• Video: Pricking
• Video: Ruling
• Video: Writing 1, and 2
• Video: Erasing a mistake
• Video: Gold Leaf
• Video: Painting 1 and 2

This was a really exciting project! I had to learn a lot, but it is all stuff that I had been looking for an opportunity to learn anyway – writing on parchment, using gold leaf. I feel very intimately acquainted with the scribes and artists who created the original Ellesmere Chaucer: it was a joy to study their work and to appreciate their skill. I would love to do more manuscript reproductions in the future!

In an effort to get closer to the medieval techniques that I emulate in my calligraphy, I have started using “Iron Gall ink.“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_gall_ink This was the ink most commonly used in the Middle Ages (and beyond). It’s interesting stuff: you start with oak galls, which are round growths found on oak trees. Oak galls appear when a wasp lays its eggs on an oak tree: the tree responds by building a ball around the eggs, and that ball is full of tannic acid, the same stuff that is used to tan leather. The oak gall is crushed up and mixed with liquid, and then iron salt is added to it. This makes a very dark black (or sometimes purplish) ink that is waterproof and does not fade, and which absorbs very well into parchment.

You can still buy iron gall ink today. It is very interesting stuff to work with. It is a very thin liquid (at least the stuff I am using is). When you first write with it, it is a very pale grey, almost clear. This makes it a challenge to use until you get used to it: when I write with it, I find myself pressing very hard with the nib because I feel like I’m not actually making much contact with the paper, or dipping my nib in the ink more frequently then I need to. But within an instant of contact with the air, the ink begins to darken. You can watch it get darker and darker over the first few seconds that it is on the page. It gets quite dark quite quickly, but if you come back in 24 hours and look at it again, you will see that it has gotten even darker. It darkens to a satisfying deep black color.

In the picture below, you can see the text darkening as it ages:

Iron gall ink is definitely a challenge to work with at first, but the results are well worth it, especially on parchment!

It’s hard to believe it’s done!

The past few weeks have been mostly waiting…. some of the gesso wasn’t holding gold leaf. First I ordered some shell gold, and had to wait for that to arrive. It helped with some of the cantankerous gesso, but not all of it. So then I realized that I should probably reconstitute the gesso using glair (an egg-based adhesive). The problem with glair is that it needs to age for 6 months before you can use it. Jerry Tresser said he would send me some, but then it turned out that he didn’t have any that was usable. So I decided to just scrape off the problem gesso and start all over again. I made the gesso pretty thick when I reconstituted it – that seems to help. So I finally got all of the gold leaf done, and added a few more little finishing touches, and then suddenly found myself looking at it and realizing I didn’t need to do anything else. That was a strange feeling. Naturally, I was able to find things to do, but they were really just tinkering and touching up, and really, it was done.

It is exciting to have it done, and to see it all finished, and to see how much it looks like the original. It is a relief that I pulled it off without any major catastrophes. It’s a relief to be done with it and to be able to apply the new skills I have learned to new projects. I will miss working on it, though.

I am so grateful that I was asked to do this project. I have finally had to learn a lot of skills that I have been wanting to learn for years. And I think I have pushed my calligraphy to a new level.

Another element of the new style I am perfecting is a new script: Anglicana. The term “Anglicana” actually describes a whole family of scripts that were in vogue in late medieval Britain. British scribes were looking for a script that was easy to write small and quickly, so by the fourteenth century they had developed a distinctly English script. It usually wasn’t used for really expensive and fancy books, but a formal version of Anglicana is very frequently found in medium-grade books, and there was also a cursive form that was used in cheap books, documentary records, and personal correspondence.

This script is definitely easier to write than Gothic, and has a nice flow to it. It does come out looking a little sloppy, but that’s part of the point of the script: it is meant to be written quickly. In fact, it was a challenge to learn the script because I needed to write very slowly to learn it, but a lot of the letter forms can only be written quickly, or they come out looking wrong.

Here is a small medieval example of Anglicana:

More can be found here. You can also browse images of the Ellesmere Chaucer, which I used extensively when I was learning the script.

And here is an image of some of my own Anglicana: