![]() ![]() You should evaluate aspect when looking at a page of script as a whole, rather than when you are looking close up at individual letters and their parts.ĭuctus: A script's ductus, by contrast, is a way of describing what the scribe did as he was forming the letters. A sense of its overall “look” will help you identify that script in future. ![]() See how it appears to you, especially in comparison to other scripts. Even though descriptions of aspect are highly personal, it is helpful to evaluate aspect when you encounter a new script. A script may be spiky, cramped, spacious, rounded, squiggly - you name it. The vocabulary of aspect is highly subjective and not at all standardized. How a script looks and how it is executedĪspect: A script's aspect is its general appearance. A minuscule script can be defined as a script written between four imaginary lines: most letters sit on the baseline and reach only up to minim-height, but ascenders on some letters reach up to an imaginary line above minim height, and descenders reach down to an imaginary line below the baseline. Minuscule script: A minuscule script, by contrast, is one that has ascenders and descenders, like our lower-case alphabet. A glance at the page tells you that this is so. Notice that, although F and L stick up slightly above minim-height and the tail of Q dips very slightly below the baseline, the overwhelming majority of letters fit between two notional lines. The script above, which we will study in the next unit, gives us our upper-case letters, but here we are concerned with why it qualifies as a majuscule script. OpenSeadragon is not available unless JavaScript is enabled. In the lessons that follow, you will learn to recognize and describe scripts and characteristics of the whole manuscript page, and to associate these scripts and page layout features with particular times and places from antiquity to the Renaissance. ![]() The emphasis on the page, as opposed to the three-dimensional codex, is because we are preparing you for an encounter with the medieval manuscript which is, in the first instance, digital: when you use online manuscript collections, you encounter the medieval book as a collection of digitized pages. We discuss codicology mainly in the sense of page layout, emphasizing changes over time in the way script and text are deployed on the page. This course concentrates on paleography in the sense of the history of script, with an emphasis on scripts used in books in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Papyrology is the study of the script and material form of documents and texts written on papyrus in the ancient world. Some schools of codicology focus on the codex as a complete object, while others are more interested in the design of the manuscript page, or mise en page - the French term for page layout.ĭiplomatic is a special branch of paleography devoted to the study of charters - both their script and their formulaic language. More broadly, it encompasses all aspects of the study of the manuscript book.Ĭodicology is the study of the physical characteristics of the manuscript book, or codex, apart from its script and letterforms per se. Paleography is the study of ancient and medieval handwriting. Once you become familiar with how we use these terms to describe scripts and letterforms in this course, you should be better equipped to understand other scholars' descriptions of scripts, even if their terminology is slightly different. In this course, we aim to teach a limited set of terms that would be understood by most Anglo-American scholars who work with manuscripts. Paleographers have used and continue to use a bewildering variety of terms, sometimes in contradictory and inscrutable ways, and scholars of typography have yet another set of terms for describing typefaces and printed letters. The first goal of this lesson is to explain the terms we will use in subsequent lessons to talk about the features of scripts, the differences between them, and the differences in the ways they are laid out on the manuscript page.Ī secondary goal is to equip you to understand descriptions of scripts by scholars in other paleographical handbooks and in manuscript descriptions. This lesson introduces the basic terminology needed to describe scripts and letters, and the physical features of the pages that carry them. ![]()
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