Excellent book on Medieval Calligraphy

One of the most valuable resources I have found for my calligraphy is Marc Drogin’s book, Medieval Calligraphy: Its History and Technique. It’s a wonderful combination of an informative historical book about medieval paleography, and a practical how-to guide for calligraphers. He shows you how to write the scripts, but he also provides lots of images from medieval manuscripts so you can see the scripts in action. He tells you the historical background behind the scripts: who used them, what sort of text they were used for, how and when they were developed.

Drogin also does a good job of simplifying the scripts so that it is possible to learn how to write them. In my research, I spend so much time staring at medieval manuscripts that I am aware of the complexities of different scribes’ handwriting – in fact, I have to learn each scribes’ idiosyncrasies so that I can read what they’ve written. I would have trouble just copying the script from a medieval manuscript, because I would try to make it too complicated for myself. Instead, I use Drogin’s book as a guide for how to write in medieval scripts, while still keeping in mind the overall appearance of medieval manuscripts to emulate in my work.