Customer Reviews

Historical Scripts: From Classical Times to the Renaissance

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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.