Charlie Fenton’s Reviews > Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages > Status Update

‘The linguistic organisation of a text in Roman antiquity basically followed the requirements of something that was to be read aloud. As a result, punctuation was expressed in rhetorical units and pauses much more than today, where syntactic division of the sentences is the rule... The continuous text could be interrupted by spaces of anything from one-half to five letters in length.’

‘In general, it is only around 1000 and shortly thereafter that what had previously, to a greater or lesser degree, lacked cohesion could be harmonised to form a coherent, smooth script. This script, now fully mastered calligraphically, avoids the extremes of both leanness and fullness, and achieves an element of tension through its tendency towards stretching’

‘The mature, well-rounded Insular half-uncial, which c. 700 was written so magnificently in the Anglo-Saxon Book of Lindisfarne and its relatives, was also used, with more or less success, in Ireland for liturgical and biblical manuscripts, occasionally in combination with minuscule.‘

‘The external appearance of charters throughout the middle ages was that of a single sheet with writing on only one side. In addition, for those documents which were written in chancery cursive or diplomatic minuscule respectively, the royal chanceries employed simpler forms, deprived from letters and private documents, for general correspondence and for legal dispositions.’

‘The equipment of the medieval scribe, who wrote on a sloping desk, consisted of ‘chalk, two pumice stones, two ink horns (for black and red ink), a sharp knife, two razors (“novaculas sive rasoria duo”) for erasing, a “punctorium”, an awl, lead, a straight edge, and a ruling stick’. The ‘punctorium’ was an instrument for making little pricked markings on the parchment to serve as guides’