Tuesday 24 November 2020

Carolingian Manual Layout

CAROLINGIAN LAYOUT 

This image from a Carolingian manuscript caught my attention due to its layout.

This is from an era with no concept of type setting. The letters were written on paper. 

You can see traces of ruled lines on the page since they didnt have the option of deleting bottom layers or grids that can be turned on and off. This is also perhaps tells us this was a copy for reading not display. The spacing between lines would also be useful for interlineal notes.


Note also the 2 forms of S - one for titles and another for lower case word endings and in the medial position.
There are a few errors Sed intra looks like one word. 
The spacings between sentences are not consistent and it looks as if the scribe was thinking too much about where to put the full stops?

Overall however its quite readable and those variances remember us of the differences between handwritten and printed documents and hte advantages for final edits of a computer?

Perhaps just for practice and after checking the modern Latin forms try typesetting this in a word processing program? Then study the differences?



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