Calligraphy & Paleography

Presents basic discussions, images, and a few useful tools to those who are interested in how we come to gain knowledge about the past, and to those just starting out with work on manuscripts.

We all love writing, and like any art, practice is essential. To make your training easier, here's a tool to generate your ideal template. Allows you to adjust for paper size, ascender, x-height, descender, nib width, slant lines, and portrait/l andscape orientatio n.

Gothic Textura Quadrata is an absolutely gorgeous script, dense and architectu ral it is a wonderful example of how letters can be art in their own right. It's also very difficult to write well, especially for a beginner. There are two details about this variant of gothic that are extremely important to get right: perfectly vertical strokes and precise spacing between those strokes. Oddly, the calligraph y books I've read focus on how to draw each letter with the minimum number of strokes. Their method helps write faster, but it is harder to be precise and get those critical details right. For a beginner, that can make this script extremely frustratin g. So I'd like to present alternate instructio ns for drawing Gothic lettering, hopefully making this script easier to learn for the beginning calligraph er.

Content includes a brief history of calligraphy, exemplars and timeline of hands, a glossary of helpful calligraphic words, and links to other calligraphy websites.

This database contains descriptions of all medieval western manuscripts written in Latin script and produced up to c. 1550 now preserved in public and semi-public collections in the Netherlands. These include the collections of libraries, museums and archives, as well as the collections of monastic orders and some other private institutions that are open to researchers.

An introduction to the history of medieval writing, including the origins of our written culture, paleography and the history of scripts, and the nature of literacy and the written word in the middle ages.

A spreadshee t for nib widths for William Mitchel, Speedball C, and Brause nibs.

Educational materials with sections on medieval and early modern paleography.

This web tutorial will help you learn to read the handwriting found in documents written in English between 1500 and 1800.

Tips and guidelines based on personal experience, intended to get beginning scribes started quickly.

When I started making scrolls, I used the ductus in my calligraph y books for whichever script I needed. As I got more and more comfortabl e with each of the scripts, I wanted to expand my knowledge and skill by attempting to replicate period scribes' hands.

I would suggest trying this after you have some experience with a few different scripts, and working at a few different sizes. It helps to be comfortabl e with the pen and forming letter shapes that you can figure out how to make the letters on your own. That said, it can also be a good exercise to train your eye and hand by spending quality time with period calligraph y.

So you've picked up your first calligraph y pen. Before you start trying to learn to write a specific calligraph ic script, get comfortabl e with the pen. I'm going to start this post by discussing how and why using these pens is different from modern round-tipp ed pens, and then suggest some practice exercises that will help prepare you for calligraph ic scripts.

An unofficial group within the SCA which offers an open forum for the exchange of information concerning the arts and technology of medieval book creation. The College promotes inquiry into a variety of period book arts: papermaking, bookbinding, binding decorations, calligraphy and illumination, wood block prints, and printing.

Links to online medieval manuscripts, catalogues, fonts, paleography, and illumination.

The Schøyen Collection comprises most types of manuscripts from the whole world spanning over 5000 years. It is the largest private manuscript collection formed in the 20th century.