VMs: Shorthand and marginalia...

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi GC,

More shorthand notes:-

I completely agree with you, marginalia might well help us peer into the 
"dark days of shorthand" pre-Bright.

Marginalia (especially incongruous or unexpected ones) have a 
disproportionately high information content... there must be experts who 
specialise in collecting/referencing medieval marginalia? David King spent 
a lot of time looking at incongruous page numbering schemata, perhaps he 
might have some idea?

However, I should point out that it would be wrong to think that medieval 
wax tablets were *completely* impermanent - a set of tiny ones were 
recently dug up on a site in Back Swinegate, York, and archaeologists were 
able to recover much of the writing on them.

http://www.yorkarchaeology.co.uk/artefacts/tablet1.htm

I'm not sure if these have been properly published yet: an early article on 
them is: 'The Role of the Wax Tablet in Medieval Literacy: A 
reconsideration in light of a recent find from York' by Michelle P. Brown, 
Journal of the British Library Volume 20, No.1, 1994. Michelle Brown is the 
curator of manuscripts at the British Library.

IIRC, looking at the whole set of Bright's characterie, many of the symbols 
are sequentially generated by rotation from each other, forming families - 
if correct, this might well point to the whole system having indeed been 
created by a unifying principle, by an underlying inventive step.

It's possible that shorthand used in Henry VIII's may have been Mr 
Ratcliffe's system (from Plymouth, as mentioned by Isaac Pitman), which was 
simply a form of aggressive abbreviation. However, AFAIK there isn't a 
known origination date for that, it was first published a century later.

I've been unable to find any academic study/listing of medieval wax tablets 
held by museums with a purview broader than a single collection - yet many 
such tablets exist (probably 1000s).

The British Library does have two books on wax tablets collections, one 
from Poland (Jasinski, as mentioned before by Rafal), and also one from 
Transylvania - I hope to view them later this week.

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....