Re: VMs: MS408 Character Development

["Maurizio M. Gavioli" <mmg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Gabriel and all the others well!

I apology for the delay in answering: I was away for the week end. And I 
also apology for the length of the post: things are getting complex...

At 11:40 01-07-05, Gabriel Landini wrote:
> Hi Maurizio,
> I found this thread quite interesting. Once, informally talking with Judith
> Field, she mentioned that the abandonment of Humanist hand did not take place
> at the same time everywhere and therefore the dating based on "changes of
> hand" should have a larger range than suggested before, depending where it
> may have been written (here in the list and also in D'Imperio, if I recall
> correct).

First of all, please don't take me too seriously! After so much time, I 
cannot be considered more than a hobbist palaeographer!! Anyway... A number 
of points need to be taken into account, I think.

1) I think it is important to understand how handwriting evolved. It may be 
unfamiliar for us, accustomed to a world of digital communication, coming 
after centuries of printed communication, but until XVI c., handwriting was 
the *only* medium for written communication and even for a rather long time 
after printing invention, it still was the *predominant* one.

In this context, much like a mother tongue, handwriting must be a *shared* 
knowledge or it would not serve its purpose: you learn it and it is 
'given': you do not mess with it or it would become difficult or impossible 
for the others to read.

So, script evolution takes place very slowly, by small steps, each of them 
hardly noticeable and often of a rather 'statistical' kind: a corner get 
slightly rounded and sometime two strokes merge into one: later in your 
life, the merging will occur more often and, maybe, your son will inherit a 
letter form with one stroke less. 'Revolutions' in writing history are very 
rare; the humanistic reform was one of them, maybe the most striking.

Yet it took longer to achieve than the whole French Revolution cycle, from 
the seizing of the Bastille to the fall of Napoleon, also it did not 
*create* any new letter form, but 'recycled' (in a different stylistic and 
'theoretical' context) pre-existing forms to which the learned milieu has 
been accustomed again after decades of ancient mss. collecting.

2) On another side, and again quite similarly to language, handwriting is 
-- must be -- a semi-automatic activity. This semi-automatism is gained 
through learning and practicing, of course, but once it is gained (and 
while it is not gained yet, you cannot be really considered literate), it 
works very similarly to speaking.

While you speak in your mother language, you may have to think about the 
concepts you want to express and the best words to express them, but not 
about concordances, verb tenses or persons, etc... it's "your language", 
you "know it".

Same -- or almost same -- for "your script": you may have to bother about 
non-graphic details (will the word fit in the line? where can I split it?) 
but if you stop pondering: "OK, this is a 't'; so start a little higher and 
go down...", you simply do not know the script enough to be "your script".

We could summarize these two elements by saying that, in order to 'work', a 
script has to be "your script" but "you do not own it".

3) A by-side note on the samples often quoted in this list: Evolution 
usually do not take place in mss. of high standing: the rich mss., 
gorgeously illuminated, with carefully planned pages, which we admire so 
much and which get reproduced in the histories (or on the Net) are normally 
the least interesting from an historic point of view. They must be 
immediately readable for the patron and must present him with something he 
is very familiar with, although on a very high technical level. So they 
usually 'freeze' the current evolution point of a script into a highly 
uniformed style: they are dead ends.

Evolution more often takes place in the less beautiful mss., maybe of more 
private usage, for which the shared "langue" is less constraining; there we 
usually find the innovative letter form or the careless 'pen turn' which 
will become later a element of a 'new script'.
_  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _

So, speaking of the timing of the "abandonment of Humanist hand" is a 
rather simplistic way of putting it: by chance the humanist writing has 
been 'adopted' -- and this is a very unusual fact in writing history which 
anyway took decades -- but it has never been 'abandoned': it evolved, 
gradually, by small changes and, at a certain point, writing historians may 
say: "Look, here we a have a new script, which we will call XYZ".
_____________________________

Another important point: As we are talking of a time roughly between end of 
'400 - beginning of '500 (maybe even later), we have to factor in 
*printing*. Printing, with respect to handwriting is a very troublesome 
element.

Printing and handwriting, or better print typeface design and handwriting 
evolution, work on totally different planes:

Printing typeface design is not a semi-automatic activity as handwriting 
is: it is very pondered, carefully planned beforehand and has to with 
drawing much more than with writing. Also, typeface design has a much 
greater flexibility as it is not constrained by the technical features of 
the writing instrument (it is possible, and it has been done, to create 
typeface which cannot be written, or only with great difficulty; of course, 
typeface creation had its own technical constrains...).

Only afterward, once a typeface gained some popularity, typeface design may 
influence handwriting by visual suggestion, as it is the case with the 
so-called "italic hand" which, with a little simplification, can be seen is 
a mixture of 'cursivization' (?) of the _littera antiqua_ and of the print 
cursive (Manuzio-like).

Of course, it may happen also the opposite: typeface designers who enjoy 
reproducing letter forms typical of handwriting (this is what Gutenber 
himself did, after all, but maybe only because ha had no other models...). 
So, there is a dialogue between typeface design and handwriting, but is a 
dialogue between two different planes, with different 'substances', 
different technical requirements and different evolution paths; to a large 
extent, a topic which still lacks, AFAIK, a systematic and sounded 
investigation.
_  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _

It is obvious, but I want to stress it anyway: all the above does NOT apply 
directly to the VMS script; this is an invented script, not an evolution 
step of a script.

It might apply to the _exempla_, yet to determine, that the VM script 
author was familiar with and had in mind while devising his script, 
particularly if we assume that, as it is the case in most script creations, 
the script is a re-cast, with different glyphs and a few oddities, of the 
writing system (and maybe of the linguistic system too!) to which the 
author has been mainly exposed.

In other words, I think those observations may be useful to better 
understand the VM script background, rather than the script itself.

> I am sure you are familiar with Cappelli's dictionary of abbreviations and 
> the
> fact that some vms characters *seem* to be exactly that.
> Despite that some of these abbreviations are more or less systematically in
> the right place within a word (like eva-y , eva-c and so on) trying to create
> substitutions to rebuild words has not yielded to any sensible breakthrough.
>
> Do you have any comments about these Latin/Italian abbreviations and the
> similarity to quite a few vms characters?

On one hand, we may safely assume that the VM script author was familiar 
with the Latin abbreviation system (as he was familiar with the _littera 
moderna_ stroke assimilation system). This is a point in favour of the 
theory that those sings in the VMS are indeed abbreviations.

On the other hand, many of those abbreviation-like signs, like for instance 
EVA 'g' or EVA 'm' (but also 'r', 's' or 'u'), are very obvious 'pen turns' 
which may come quite spontaneously to anybody with the penmanship of a late 
Middle Age scholar. This might mean that those signs do not have the same 
meaning (or at least a similar function) they had in the 'normal writing', 
but that they are simply common, or well-practiced, graphic material 
borrowed into the script, like many 'full characters' of the script.

Does this make any sense?

        Maurizio



 Maurizio M. Gavioli -  VistaMare  Software
 via San Bernardo 5, I-16030 Pieve Ligure, ITALY
 http://www.vistamaresoft.com/

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