I just found a post over at Bavardess about Textual Interventions and Medieval Mashups. This is something I have thought about a lot, but haven’t actually written about it, and I think Bavardess does a beautiful job in her post.

She’s talking about new Web 2.0 social media stuff, and how websites are no longer just passively published, but are a constant ongoing process of creation and addition and user annotation, like Wikipedia. Like Bavardess, I have always thought that this actually makes the web a lot more like a medieval manuscript: each time a scribe made a new copy of a medieval manuscript, the text was a little bit different, and scribes and readers felt free to add their own annotations and ideas to manuscripts. Medieval readers were very involved in the creation and evolution of the text, and all left their marks on their manuscripts. Bavardess explains it very well, so you can go read her post for more details.

I bought a new book about medieval calligraphy the other day, that I think is going to be pretty useful: Illumination for Modern Calligraphers by Christopher Jarman. Jarman has collected images from Victorian art books that emulate medieval manuscripts. In some ways, the book is strangely removed from medieval art, since it’s a modern copy of a Victorian copy of medieval art. However, all of it is still very closely based on medieval manuscripts, and on providing nice do-it-yourself instructions for the modern crafter. The book has a lot of black-and-white outlines, so it’s easy to copy (or even trace) the original artwork. Jarman also discusses the basic tools and techniques of the modern art of medieval-style illumination, so this is a great book for beginners. There are also some examples of medieval alphabets, although there isn’t much guidance on how to write them yourself. So all in all, I think this is a useful book for beginners and dabblers, but it’s full of enough images that experts can draw inspiration from it as well.

Wow, I can’t believe how busy May has been! Usually when I don’t blog for a long time, it’s because I’m busy with non-calligraphy stuff, but in May, I have been really busy with calligraphy! Well, non-calligraphy has kept me busy too – I have been writing my dissertation (all but 2 chapters drafted!), and I got a dog. He’s wonderful and amazing, but it’s been a big adjustment working a doggie into my routine!

I have been learning a new script:

This English Gothic cursive was common in late medieval Britain, and since that’s the period I focus on in my research, it makes sense to learn the script. It’s a tricky one to learn, though – the distinctive look of the script comes from the fact that it was written very quickly, but to learn the script, I have to write the letters slowly, so they don’t look right. Yet. I’m working on it.

I have also had to revive a script that I haven’t used in a while for another project in May. I was asked to write a prayer in Irish for a retiring Catholic priest, in a style as close to the Book of Kells as possible. The Book of Kells is written in Insular Majuscule, which is a delightfully quirky script. I haven’t used it in a long time, so I had to practice a bit. I’m really happy with how the finished product came out – it was really fun to look at the Book of Kells a lot and copy its style. The customer was happy with how it came out, too – so happy that she ordered a second one!

Finally, I had a fairly straightforward commission for an Irish blessing to celebrate a wedding, but I didn’t manage to get any pictures of the finished product before I mailed it off.

So it was a busy month of May! June promises to be busy, too, but hopefully I’ll be able to make more time for blogging!

I just found this delightful video of Christopher de Hamel. He worked for many years at Sotheby’s cataloging, describing, and valuing the manuscripts they sold, and he is now a librarian at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He has probably personally handled and perused more medieval manuscripts than anyone else alive today. He also does an amazing job of writing fascinating books about manuscripts. His A History of Illuminated Manuscript is the standard introduction to manuscripts. I highly recommend all of his books. The video below is wonderful: not only is he talking about the fascinating portrayal of elephants in medieval England, it is also fun to watch him blithely flipping through a 12th-century manuscript.

There is another exception to the general pattern of buying books in the Middle Ages that I discussed in an earlier post. University students needed books, but they usually couldn’t afford to hire a scribe to write a whole book for them. Instead, they usually copied out their own books themselves. However, to make a copy of a book, they needed an original to copy from. So the booksellers of university towns, especially Paris, developed what is known as the pecia system. Booksellers would divide a book into small sections, and rent those out one at a time. A student could go rent one little chunk of the book, take it home to copy it, and then bring it back and get the next one. The University of Paris actually regulated the pecia put out by booksellers, to make sure that they weren’t giving students copies with lots of errors. Students tended to write their books in small writing, often in two columns. They often left lots of room in the margins for taking notes.