#Tumblr the 5 fs of medieval manuscripts series#

In the following line, note that punctuation is a little irregular. In Vergil’s day, ae probably had an “ai” sound like the English word “eye”, whereas by the early Middle Ages the diphthong was scarcely distinguishable from the sound of the letter e, as evidenced from misspellings in works such as the Confession of Saint Patrick.Īnd here’s an example of the ae abbreviation. The move to substitute e for the ae diphthong may have been motivated in part by the change in pronunciation. Other medieval documents, such as the 1215 Magna Carta, simply used an e in place of ae. Another way, which this Carolingian manuscript employs, was to write an e with a small hooked mark below, presumably indicating an a that was once there. One method was to crunch the letters together into the æ character, traditionally called an “ash” in English. In Medieval Latin, the ae diphthong could be written several ways. Now in the pitch-black night he was enjoying the middle of his rest The example verse below has two tildes, one of which was re-worked by a later hand in darker ink to avoid confusion about the adjective’s corresponding noun. The m- or n-tilde is also sometimes found in the middle of a word, as in the case of “omni” below. This device is really common at the ends of words in the Latin accusative case. It indicates that an m or an n should occur after the letter it is written above. The tilde (little horizontal squiggle) shown below was originally a tiny letter m or n written above the preceding letter. Over time the floating letters became more cramped and were reduced to tighter, smaller symbols. Most (though not all) scribal abbreviations were originally letters drawn above, beside or below other letters. Scribal abbreviations are a set of marks, squiggles, lines and dots which denote missing letters. He stood firm like an immovable rock of the sea (7.585) In rivalry they stood about the palace of king Latinus Our manuscript starts at line 394 of book seven of the Aeneid. The section we are looking at starts at this page, and you can check it against a plain Latin text of the Aeneid here. The manuscript I’m using can be fully viewed here, courtesy of the British Library’s Digitised Manuscripts.

Instead, for the sheer pleasure of reading Latin from parchment, I will walk you through the quirks of one particular manuscript at one particular point in time and hope that this will whet your appetite for further study. Cappelli’s work looks broadly at various scribal abbreviations across more than a thousand years of manuscript traditions, and if I were to try the same approach, I bet that my humble blog post wouldn’t come close to competing with how well he explained this subject. If you prefer a more comprehensive and top-down approach, the best resource for you is the classic introduction, The elements of abbreviation in medieval Latin paleography by Adriano Cappelli, first published 1899, translated by David Heimann and Richard Kay in 1982. My approach is to parachute you into the thick of the action and explain the rules as we go. At some point I might make similar posts for Ancient Greek and Middle English, so even if you don’t know Latin, I hope I can introduce you to the joys of reading medieval manuscripts. The writing is quite clear and it has a decent number of scribal abbreviations, but it is quite manageable for those trying to read Latin on parchment for the first time. I’ve selected a very handsomely written 11th century Carolingian manuscript of Vergil’s Aeneid.

#Tumblr the 5 fs of medieval manuscripts series#

Realms, nations and places (Top)In this two-part series we will do just that. Paul the Deacon - historian (8th century) I follow though a lots of blogs and i've tried to record their URL:s into my 'I follow' page.īertrand de Born (viscount and troubadour) NOTE: this is a secondary blog so I can't follow you back under this name even I would like to.

In addition I collect links to translated medieval manuscripts. Mainly illuminations, mosaics, frescoes and other works of art from era 500-1500. THEME: A page related to medieval history and culture.