Download PDF | Albert Derolez, The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books from the Twelfth to the Early Sixteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, 2003.
332 Pages
This book is the first to present a detailed survey of all book scripts in use in Western and Central Europe from c. 1100 to c. 1530 (with the exception of Humanistic script). This period has been poorly served in almost all other palaeographical handbooks. By adopting a largely new classification of scripts based on objective criteria which incorporates many of the terms currently in use, this book aims to end the confusion which has hitherto obscured the study of late medieval handwriting. It is based upon an examination of a very large number of dated specimens, and is thus the first survey to take full advantage of the incomparable palaeographical resource provided by the Catalogues of Dated Manuscripts. The text is illustrated throughout with over 500 drawings of letters and symbols. Actual-size reproductions of 160 manuscripts provide datable specimens of all the scripts discussed, accompanied by partial transcriptions and palaeographical commentary.
ALBERT DEROLEZ is Curator Emeritus of Special Collections in the Universiteitsbibliotheek Gent, Professor Emeritus of Palaeography and Codicology at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Université Libre de Bruxelles, and holds the presidency of the Comité International de Paléographie Latine. His publications include The Autograph Manuscript of the Liber Floridus: A Key to the Encyclopaedia of Lambert of Saint-Omer (1999); The Library of Raphael de Marcatellis, Abbot of St Bavon'’s, Ghent, 1437-1508 (1979); Codicologie des manuscrits en écriture humanistique sur parchemin (1984); and he is editor-in chief of Corpus Catalogorum Belgii: The Medieval Booklists of the Southern Low Countries.
Introduction
PALAEOGRAPHY AS AN ART
I cannot teach the art of assigning dates to manuscripts: I am even inclined to think that it cannot be taught. The study of facsimiles to begin with, and, later on, the constant handling of the books themselves — these supply the only safe guidance to that condition of eye and mind which will enable the student to say unhesitatingly “This is a twelfth century book and this is an early fifteenth; this was written in Italy and this in England’. For myself I have come to depend almost entirely upon general impression in forming an estimate of date. This may seem to the layman a precarious method; and doubtless other workers find that the form of individual letters and similar details stand them in better stead than the general look of the page. Indeed, the study of such minutiae is indispensable in the case of the earlier manuscripts; but for the large majority of those which belong to the later medieval period, from the eleventh century to the fifteenth, the general impression is to my mind a perfectly safe guide. But it is a guide whose aid can only be gained by means of long handling of the books. Viewing practice therefore as the essential, I must entirely abstain from an attempt to help my reader to estimate the date of the manuscript he is to describe.”
This quotation from the unpublished notes made by Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936), one of the most experienced specialists in medieval manuscripts yet to have lived, contains a number of fundamental claims and assumptions which, almost a century later, invite comment and constitute an ideal starting-point for the present introduction.
Indeed, one of the most important tasks generally assigned to palaeography is dating and localizing undated manuscripts of unknown origin. This, James says, cannot be taught. For him, it is only through experience that one may gain the ‘condition of eye and mind’ required to judge the date and origin of a given codex.
This belief is not unique to James. Many palaeographers, among them the greatest, believe in the so-called ‘palaeographer’s eye’ and consider palaeography (except for its basic task of deciphering) an art. This was, for example, the opinion of Bernhard Bischoff, the author of the best handbook on the subject yet written, who called palaeography ‘eine Kunst des Sehens und der Einfiihlung’ (‘an art of seeing and comprehending’).? It is also held by Francoise Gasparri, who claims that only ‘Pexpérience de chacun, expérience que rien ne remplace’ (‘individual experience, which nothing can replace’) will allow the student to ascertain the date of a given manuscript.
Our respect for such authorities as James and Bischoff does not prevent us from placing a question mark over their definition of palaeography as an art gained principally by experience. Indeed, when an extremely experienced palaeographer declares that a given manuscript was written in Northern France in the first half of the thirteenth century, but fails to indicate the criteria on which this statement is based, he may bea perfect connoisseur, but he is not being an effective teacher. What is more, he unconsciously contributes to the present-day crisis of palaeography as a discipline.
THE CRISIS OF PALAEOGRAPHY
There can be no doubt that a crisis now exists in the discipline which started in the seventeenth century with Jean Mabillon (d. 1707) and culminated, as many claim, in the twentieth with Jean Mallon (d. 1982). The number of handbooks and atlases published today is in marked contrast with the low esteem in which palaeography is currently held as an academic discipline, though one for which Franco Bartoloni still predicted a bright future as late as 1952.” Changes in higher education and new trends in historical and literary research have certainly been unfavourable to the study of palaeography. The decline in the study of Latin has been almost fatal for the study of medieval script (vernacular palaeography being a rather narrower field, not fully reflecting general European developments in script). Some modern trends in medieval studies do not look favourably upon the close study of the sources, now often considered time-consuming and irrelevant.
Palaeographers themselves are no doubt not free from blame. In their eagerness to dissociate themselves from the old-fashioned, purely descriptive methods of earlier scholars, many specialists of today search for underlying social developments in the history of script and, in doing so, direct their attention towards matters other than script proper. A vast movement in favour of theory and a tendency to gravitate towards national schools of palaeography are distinctive features of the palaeographical scholarship of the last century. After the ‘School of Munich’ the ‘Nouvelle paléographie francaise’ came to the fore, alongside a sociologically oriented Italian school which attaches major importance to the script of semiliterate people and the history of the teaching of handwriting. Whereas diversity in scholarship is a good thing in itself, exasperated mutual criticism and an overdose of theory weaken the position of palaeography a great deal. The idea has been advanced that the time for palaeography in its traditional conception is over, that the ‘history of writing’ should take its place. A well-known palaeographer has written that ‘nowadays nothing basically new can be done in the field of the palaeography of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries if we continue to ask the traditional questions proper to the discipline’.°
EARLY VS. LATE MIDDLE AGES
This last quotation reinforces James’s remark by drawing attention to the difference in treatment between the scripts of the early Middle Ages and those of the late Middle Ages. Whether the turning-point is 800 (as Lowe held) or 1100 (as was, for example, Harrison Thomson’s opinion), the number of surviving manuscripts from the two periods is in no way comparable. One can thus understand why manuscripts dating from before 800 enjoy a preferential treatment in handbooks and atlases. This is, nevertheless, a paradoxical situation, as these tools present a great deal of information about those manuscripts which the reader is much less likely to encounter, and ridiculously little about the codices which survive by the thousands.
It is difficult to understand why some palaeographers, from James onwards, draw a distinction between two palaeographies, one of early medieval scripts, where minutiae’ count, and one of late medieval handwriting. Gasparri even claims that ‘A partir des temps carolingiens I’écriture latine n’a plus d'histoire’ (‘after the Carolingian period, there is no longer a history of Latin handwriting’).’
Although the cultural, social and economic conditions that shaped script and writing in the later Middle Ages were very different from those of the early Middle Ages, one suspects that the difference in treatment on the part of the palaeographers has more to do with the immense mass of manuscripts that survive from the period after 1100, which makes it impossible to provide a survey for the whole of Europe. Indeed, most manuals display a strong national bias in their coverage of the later period and tend to concentrate on material from each author’s own country. Partial exceptions are the handbooks and surveys by Battelli, Bischoff, Cencetti and some North American scholars.®
BOOK SCRIPT VS. DOCUMENTARY SCRIPT
This book deals only with book scripts, which constitutes a serious limitation. As is well known, until the beginning of the twentieth century Latin palaeography comprised the study of documents as well as manuscripts. A scholar like Léopold Delisle (1826-1910) was a specialist who was as much at home in libraries as in archives. The once-popular handbooks of Prou and Reusens discuss, century by century, first manuscripts, then documents. Since Ludwig Traube (1861-1907), however, who was a philologist, there has been a tendency to dissociate the two branches and to pursue the study of book scripts independently from that of documentary scripts. This trend has been reinforced by the great enterprise of the Catalogues of Dated Manuscripts (CMD).° This invaluable collection should not blind us to the fact that the separation is an artificial one, even if there are usually intrinsic differences between the two kinds of script. Mallon was in a way correct when, in his characteristically exuberant manner, he fulminated against the division of palaeography into separate branches according to the function, content, form or material of the manuscripts or documents studied.'°
Such separation between books and documents deprives us of the very basis for understanding the evolution and diversification of scripts. At the risk of simplifying outrageously, the relations between book script and documentary script might be sketched as follows. While book scripts have always involved a minimum degree of formality, the script of many documents tends to be informal. In order to produce documents more rapidly, the standard letter forms were modified and became cursive:'! they may be marked by such features as roundness, broadness, a reduced number of strokes, by loops and ligatures, fragmentation, etc. Over the course of time, the new letter forms sometimes came to be regarded as the norm and could be stylized and executed in a calligraphic way by augmenting once more the number of strokes and reducing the number of ligatures, thus producing a new canonized book script. Seen in this way, the history of script might be described as an alternation of increasing cursivity, on the one hand, and consolidation and calligraphy, on the other. The field in which the changes take place is the documentary one, the chief domain of the cursive scripts. In their most uncanonized form of “écriture commune’ or “écriture usuelle’, such scripts are (with some exaggeration) said to be ‘spontaneous, living scripts, the expression of the real physiology of writing’.'*
This is the place to mention the strong links that exist between palaeography and diplomatic. In many universities the two disciplines are taught by the same person, and in some handbooks the border between the two is vague. This situation is common to Europe as a whole, but it appears to be especially true of Italy, Spain and Portugal. It goes without saying that a national perspective, never far away in late medieval palaeography, becomes dominant when the scripts of chanceries and their documents are being discussed.
Indeed, the diversification of documentary scripts along national and regional lines was infinitely greater than was the case for book scripts. It therefore may be possible to find a scholar who is competent in all late medieval book scripts used in the various countries of Europe. But it would be impossible to find a palaeographer who is informed on the subject of European documentary handwriting in all its variety from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. !9
It is indeed the present book’s purpose to take a Europe-wide perspective with regard to late medieval handwriting in books, but it cannot take fully into account documentary scripts as well, in spite of the objections raised above. It will therefore be unable to reveal the underlying backgrounds to the genesis and transformation of scripts. But book scripts have the advantage of being a coherent group, notwithstanding the variety of their appearance, in that they must obey two rules, namely the demands of legibility and beauty. Book scripts, to a greater extent than documentary scripts, were intended for a general readership (in so far as one existed) and will generally lack features that impede legibility, such as variant forms for one letter, or ligatures. They also have certain aesthetic qualities, which made them acceptable, even pleasing, to the contemporary reader. The preference for ‘constructed’ letters, made in several strokes, is one of their basic features. Both elements (but especially beauty) are difficult to define, but we must assume that together they determine the ‘formality’ of book scripts. !4
METHOD OF STUDY
Our analysis of scripts will essentially be based on morphology. In the light of all chat has hitherto been adduced to argue against focusing on letter forms, this may seem an unfortunate decision. Have we not been told that letter shapes are accidents, and that the ductus is the fundamental factor in handwriting? That it is not the visible forms themselves of the letters, signs and ligatures which are important, but the way they have been traced? That only script ‘nel suo farsi’ (‘as a process’) should be studied? Ductus is a much debated and vague concept. For Mallon (whom I follow here), it is the way the letter is constructed by means of asequence of strokes, what the Italians call ‘tratteggio’, and Gumbert ‘structure’.!°
Ductus in this sense has rarely been studied in the context of late medieval scripts; Gumbert rightly warns us that in calligraphic scripts (such as Textualis Formata) it is often very difficult to distinguish the strokes composing the letters and the order and direction in which they were traced.!° Gilissen, on the other hand, has become increasingly distrustful of the importance of ductus except for the study of script evolution.’” As an investigation of ductus is also a very time-consuming affair, it will not be our primary concern. Although the subject of writing technique will not be omitted altogether, we will focus rather on its results, the letter forms.
Neither shall we pay too much attention to general impressions. General impressions are important and, as said at the beginning, are often sufficient for the experienced palaeographer. Their great deficiency, however, lies in the difficulty of putting them into words in an unambiguous way. Also, they are based not only on the script, but also on the appearance of the page as a whole, and consequently take account of codicological and ornamental features.
Since we have deliberately chosen the morphology of the scripts themselves to be the focus for our palaeographical research, one may ask whether morphological features can be described in an objective way. The traditional descriptions of distinctive features as given in innumerable commentaries accompanying plates are mostly unsatisfactory. Many qualifying terms and descriptions are in the last resort the subjective opinion of the author alone. The reader can only guess what is meant by terms such as ‘large’, ‘small’, ‘clear’, ‘elegant’, ‘compressed’, ‘wide’, ‘precise’, ‘workmanlike’, ‘competent’, ‘vigorous’ etc. Complete descriptions letter by letter, as provided, for example, by Steffens, are off-putting, and descriptions of select letter forms are only useful if the chosen letters are really significant. Which letters are significant depends of course on the type of script being considered, and consequently on the typology of scripts underlying the description. And this leads us inevitably to the problem of the nomenclature of scripts.
How is it possible to proceed in such a way that the description of a specimen of handwriting is as clear and convincing to its reader as it is to its author? An obvious answer is: by replacing qualitative data by quantitative ones, and thus turning palaeography into an ‘art of measurement’, to quote Bischoff’ regretful words.'® Indeed there is very much to be said in favour of a quantitative approach to a matter so difficult to treat adequately with other techniques.!”
Two methods have been tested in this field. The first consists in measuring the letters, calculating their weight, their slant, the pen angle, etc., and then creating a typical alphabet on the basis of numerous examples of each letter that is found ina given script. The method was taken to extremes by Léon Gilissen in his Expertise.”° This work, highly acclaimed at the time of its publication, is simultaneously an unusual enquiry into an extremely difficult problem, and, in its impracticability, a deterrent to all those who might be inclined to follow its example.
The quantitative method which should be applied to palaeography is a statistical one. It consists of counting and measuring significant features of handwriting and charting the results. An attractive and relatively simple example is the method proposed by Anscari Mund6 at the Sixth Colloquium of the Comité International de Paléographie in Munich in 1981.7! It consists of a table in which each of the palaeographical features of a given, undated manuscript is compared with parallel features in a series of dated codices of about the same date.
More sophisticated (and more demanding) are the statistical methods developed by the French team of researchers centred on Carla Bozzolo and Ezio Ornato. In addition to their well-known codicological enquiries, they have also undertaken studies of palaeographical problems.** By counting the different types of abbreviations occurring in Psalm ror in a large number of manuscripts and printed books, they were able, for example, to identify for the first time some laws that regulated the use of abbreviations, and consequently something of the hidden processes of handwriting. Their results show what can be achieved by well-conducted statistical research on ancient scripts, as long as only measurable and quantifiable data are being considered. By applying statistical methods to palaeography, we will, no doubt, arrive at important new and objective statements.”’ The method applied hitherto in palaeographical handbooks has produced an authoritarian discipline, the pertinence of which depends on the authority of the author and the faith of the reader.
In the absence of sufficient existing quantitative palaeographical research, the morphological method proposed here cannot involve statistics. Instead it will consist in studying principally those graphs which, within a given type of script, display distinctive characteristics, the forms that differ from the ‘normal’ ones, and other features that are readily identifiable and can be described in an unequivocal manner. This method may be judged crude, inexpert and unrefined. But in the face of the imbroglio into which late medieval palaeography has lapsed, it is hoped that this approach will gain more unanimity than other methods have been able to achieve.
However far we want to go in the search for objective data, our method must always be based on the assumption that script types are historical realities. The starting-point for our research is therefore the classification of scripts and their nomenclature. These two interrelated problems, which have proved a stumblingblock for all students of Gothic palaeography up to the present, will be discussed below (pp. 13-24).
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