When an s appears at the end of a word in this manuscript, it may be written in the more familiar snakey s form. Try reading the texts aloud – enunciating the “s” sound – as you work through these passages, to help familiarise yourself with the letters. With some practice, it doesn’t take too long to get used to the distinction and the new shapes of words. This may seem like a tiny difference, and the verse above may have been a pain to read at first, but do persist. The long s has a kind of bump on the left hand side, instead of having a line all the way through like an f. Let’s compare the letters in the example below: Protinus hinc fuscis tristis dea tollitur alisĪt once the grim goddess is lifted here on dusky wings (Aen. In the 11th century (and for most of the history of Latin manuscripts and early print books), it was conventional to use the “long s” instead of the more recognisable “snakey s”. Although it was superseded by the Gothic or Blackletter script family in many regions during the late medieval period, it was admired by humanists in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and eventually formed the basis of our modern lower-case typography. It was developed during the Carolingian Renaissance and spread widely across Western Europe between approximately the ninth and thirteenth centuries. the tall part of “d” and the down-stroke of “q”) help give each letter a visually distinctive shape. ( Source)Ĭarolingian Minuscule is a very reader-friendly Latin script, mainly because its long ascenders and descenders (eg. Our manuscript starts at line 394 of book seven of the Aeneid.ġ: The script Carolingian Alphabet. The section we are looking at starts at this page, and you can check it against a plain Latin text of the Aeneid here. The manuscript I’m using can be fully viewed here, courtesy of the British Library’s Digitised Manuscripts. Instead, for the sheer pleasure of reading Latin from parchment, I will walk you through the quirks of one particular manuscript at one particular point in time and hope that this will whet your appetite for further study. Cappelli’s work looks broadly at various scribal abbreviations across more than a thousand years of manuscript traditions, and if I were to try the same approach, I bet that my humble blog post wouldn’t come close to competing with how well he explained this subject. If you prefer a more comprehensive and top-down approach, the best resource for you is the classic introduction, The elements of abbreviation in medieval Latin paleography by Adriano Cappelli, first published 1899, translated by David Heimann and Richard Kay in 1982. My approach is to parachute you into the thick of the action and explain the rules as we go. At some point I might make similar posts for Ancient Greek and Middle English, so even if you don’t know Latin, I hope I can introduce you to the joys of reading medieval manuscripts. The writing is quite clear and it has a decent number of scribal abbreviations, but it is quite manageable for those trying to read Latin on parchment for the first time. I’ve selected a very handsomely written 11th century Carolingian manuscript of Vergil’s Aeneid. In this two-part series we will do just that.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |