![]() ![]() ![]() Major divisions of text are marked by leather tabs. Cross symbols in red passim throughout text. 6 to 8 line pen flourished initials in red passim, with extensive pen flourishes extending into the margins. Both boards damaged by worms., 1 and 2 line initials in red passim, some with flourishing extending into the margin. Tooling includes central panel and rosette and vine-like patterns. Two pairs of claps on fore edge catching on upper cover. Original brass bosses and clasps on corner and center of both covers. The whole framed by multiple blind rules and by a broad border of vines and flowers. Leather stamped with a central panel of ogival lozenges, each enclosing a central botanical stamp. That Petrarch and his book-hunters never knew this spared them a lot of anxiety and disappointment.Notes: Catchwords occasionally on the verso, passim., Bound in contemporary blind-tooled reddish brown calf over wooden boards. The letters the humanists thought Roman, were in fact medieval, dark-agey. The irony is that these manuscripts were themselves ‘medieval’, the letters having been developed during the period known to us – and not to Petrarch or later humanists – as the Carolingian Renaissance. The oldest books they were hoping to find had been copied in the 9th and 10th centuries. Inspired by Petrarch, the humanists’ mission was to recover the writings of classical antiquity preserved in manuscripts which had fallen out of circulation and were languishing in European monasteries. He and later generations of humanists found the letters they were looking for in old manuscripts that they had set out to rescue from destruction and oblivion. His point was simple: books need letters which are easy to read, instantly ‘decodable’ and, above all, beautiful – and beauty was a function of legibility. ![]() All in the name of space saving.īut Petrarch didn’t care about economics. The letters were packed together tightly, the space between them was minimal and they were heavily abbreviated according to ‘codes’ which were becoming increasingly more labyrinthine. The dominant type of letters in circulation was what he now refer to as Gothic script, and which though easily recognisable as ‘Gothic’ from as far away as the Moon, the letters were – and still are – incredibly difficult to read. Petrarch lived at a time when book letters (or hands) had never been more uniform across the Latin West. According to Petrarch, the ‘Dark Ages’ had produced illegible writing, not ‘neat and clear letters’ (littera castigata et clara), as he would have hoped to find in the manuscripts with which he surrounded himself. Petrarch articulated an objection against the evolution of Latin script towards illegibility, just like he had previously described the period between the fall of Rome and his own time – our ‘Middle Ages’ – as ‘surrounded by darkness and dense gloom’.Īny book script is a reflection of its own age. His grievance was not against some local scribes whose handwriting made reading slow and painful. In one of his letters, the 14th-century Italian poet and proto-humanist Petrarch complained that he found it hard to read the Gothic writing of the manuscripts of his generation. This is a German manuscript from the 14th century written in letters which would’ve been very familiar to Petrarch (Basel, Universitätsbibliothek / B IV 8) Widespread, though very difficult to read, almost every word is abbreviated. ![]()
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