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- Title
"Terrible Letters": Bad Handwriting and its Implications, 1020-1220.
- Authors
Treharne, Elaine
- Abstract
This essay takes as its central point of investigation the modern cliché of "bad handwriting" and investigates this in the contexts of what present-day palaeographers have inherited from their foundational predecessors, and in terms of what the phrase might have indicated in different medieval moments of textual production. The essay opens with a reminder that in preprint western culture the role and practices of the scribe were fundamental to information transfer and the making permanent of knowledge and socio-intellectual aspiration. This reminder comes in the form of the close analysis of a sermon of Pope Innocent III, raising the profile of the scribe, which runs counter to some of the ways in which scribal activities have subsequently been described and judged by modern scholars. Thinking about what might constitute poor or terrible handwriting leads to analyses of late and early medieval statements on writing from the Paston Letters and Bede's Ecclesiastical History. Both sources show a very different understanding of the nature and consequences of bad handwriting.
- Subjects
SCRIBES; PALEOGRAPHY; MANUSCRIPTS; BADE language; PASTON Letters
- Publication
SELIM, 2023, Vol 28, p79
- ISSN
1132-631X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.17811/selim.28.2023.79-96