Historical Scripts: From Classical Times to the Renaissance [Paperback]

Stan Knight (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1998

Reprint with minor corrections of second edition. The craft of calligraphy has a 2000-year history in the Western world. Up to the time of the Renaissance, calligraphy was the only means of preserving literature, and so, it played a vital role in the spread of learning, culture, and religion. Historical scripts were not rigidly-fixed styles; they represented the high peaks in an endlessly shifting landscape. Throughout centuries, styles of writing were continually being modified and developed in response to a multitude of influences encompassing political, religious, aesthetic, intellectual, sociological, and pragmatic changes in the ways that books were made and scripts were written. The modern calligrapher, typographer, historian, and anyone interested in western lettering and documents benefits from studying the methods, skills, and attitudes of generations of historical scribes who produced such outstanding and accomplished works for so many centuries. Revised and expanded, this book is an excellent survey of bookhands with its full-page, enlarged illustrations and solidly researched sources. It is a useful text for studying the history of manuscripts as well as the details of letter construction. This work also helps one make judgments about the technical condition of letter writing and its qualities of rhythm and movement, possible only when consulting an original manuscript. The author has gone to considerable lengths to obtain photographs that are well-focused and lit so that the tactile qualities of surfaces, ink tone, and flow are revealed. The author has chosen examples of formal writing that show a coherent and reasonably consistent relationship between methods of tool use and letter formation, making the construction of a script much easier to grasp in practice. He has also made the effort of selecting writing without idiosyncrasies of style.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 111 pages
• Publisher: Oak Knoll Pr; 2 Revised edition (May 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1884718574
• ISBN-13: 978-1884718571
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,795,083 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Astonishing quality reproductions, August 1, 2006

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a reader (Brazil) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Historical Scripts: From Classical Times to the Renaissance (Hardcover)

A very well conceived book, with superb photos (all black and white), with one line of each script reproduced in its actual size. Painstaking research resulting in a magnificent selection of manuscripts.
It is divided in 6 sections:
Classical letters (Greek and Roman inscriptions);
Majuscule Scripts (Rustic Capitals, Square Capitals, Greek Uncials, Latin Uncials);
Emergence of the Minuscule (Roman Half-Uncials, Insular Half-Uncials, Caroline Minuscules [Continental style Caroline], English Caroline Minuscules, Compressed Caroline Minuscules, Italian Caroline Minuscules);
Gothic Scripts (Protogothic, Gothic Quadrata, Gothic Prescissus [Praescissa, sine pedibus], Gothic Textura, Gothic Batarde);
Capital Development (Caroline Capitals, English Capitals, Early Gothic Capitals, Gothic Capitals);
Humanist Scripts (Gothic Rotunda, Humanist Square Capitals, Humanist Italic Corsiva [bookhand and documentary hooked-ascender Cancellaresca], Humanist Italic Formata, Humanist Cursive).
A glossary, a select bibliography, and indices (of names and of manuscripts) are included. Some of the works mentioned in the text are absent in the bibliography (e.g., Jean Mallon's Paleographie Romaine, Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1952).
Attention is given to monumental epigraphy in the first plates.
Though updated and correcting traditional misconceptions, this is primarily a book for historically-minded calligraphers, not for palaeographers, in that it excludes documentary and everyday scripts, as well as illegible (for today's standards) bookhands. Basically, only scripts from the times of Roman and medieval graphical unity, in their best calligraphic forms and insofar as they have `living descendants', are reproduced.
Hands between the early Middle Ages and the emergence of the Caroline minuscule (precaroline or `national') are dismissed as "regional" or "local dialects"; thus the author puts aside Visigothic, Beneventan, and all the scripts derived from the New Roman Common Script (New Roman Cursive). Strangely enough (for those outside the Anglo-Saxon world) he makes place for the Insular scripts. Of the cursive gothic scripts, only Batarde (in a Bourguignonne-like version) is present, perhaps because it is similar to the many versions of the Secretary, despite being one of the most elegantly illegible hands of the late Middle Ages on account of its various forms for N, R, S, and of V-like Y and X, as well as its place rules for the use of V or U.
There are no instructions on ductus, as previous knowledge of it is already assumed.