Ordering Custom Calligraphy

Many of the most rewarding projects I have ever done have been custom orders. I love taking a customer's special text and illuminating it--both literally and figuratively. The combination of my own creativity with texts and symbols that are meaningful to my customers can yield beautiful results. I will be delighted to design calligraphy just for you. Calligraphy is a great medium for wedding invitations, birth announcements, certificates, envelope addresses, or any text that you desire.

--Morgan Kay

To order custom calligraphy, send an email inquiry to Morgan@BygoneArts.com to discuss texts and rates.

Rate Guidelines

Each project is priced individually, and I can be flexible to work within your budget. However, here are some very rough guidelines:

Scripts

In striving to recreate the styles of medieval illuminated manuscripts, any calligrapher must choose between legibility and historical accuracy. Many medieval scripts are very difficult for modern viewers to read. The examples of scripts below are hopefully a happy medium that provides legibility while recreating the feel of medieval manuscripts. For each customer, I am happy to adjust the script to suit individual tastes. Here are examples of the scripts I commonly use, and some background information about their historical context. If there is a particular manuscript or a particular script you would like me to emulate, I am happy to use scripts other than those pictured here. For more information about medieval scripts and manuscripts, see Books and Resources.

Uncial

Uncial was used as a display script in many of the oldest medieval manuscripts. It is based on Roman inscriptions, and was thus considered appropriate for formal Latin texts--it is found in the most important display manuscripts of the Early Middle Ages. It was used primarily from the 2nd to the 7th centuries.

Insular Majuscule

Once Christianity and Roman culture reached the British Isles in the 5th and 6th centuries, the monks who copied texts there developed their own version of Uncial, known as Insular Majuscule, which they used as a formal display script. It is particularly found in the 7th through 9th centuries. Celtic scribes particularly liked this script: it is the script used in the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells.

Insular Minuscule

This is the other script used in the British Isles in the Early Middle Ages. It is less formal than the Insular Majuscule script. It was used for vernacular texts, on the rare occasions when the vernacular was used. For instance, the Lindisfarne Gospels is written in Latin in Insular Majuscule, but over each Latin word the Old English translation is written in Insular Minuscule.

Carolingian Minuscule

Distraught by the confusion caused by a profusion of regional scripts, Charlemagne asked his court scribes to develop a uniform script. They duly produced Caroline minuscule which is more or less the same script that we use today. Caroline minuscule came into being in the 9th century, but continued to be used throughout the Middle Ages. Carolingian scribes systematically copied many ancient Roman texts: when Humanist scholars in the Renaissance sought the oldest surviving copies of Classical texts, they found those texts in Caroline minuscule, and thus thought that this was the script used by the Romans. They adopted the script for their manuscripts and early printed texts, and it has been with us ever since.

Gothic

Gothic is a notoriously difficult script to read (and to write). It was used all over Europe from the 12th century onwards in a wide variety of styles. It was developed to be a very compact and quickly-written script, primarily so that students and scholars of the newly-founded universities could have affordable and portable books. There are many different kinds of Gothic found in different times and places throughout the Late Middle Ages.