Brian's Notebook

Tuesday 27 June 2017

A Medieval project (5)

In the previous week we just practiced a bit of writing; for this week, students were supposed to write and decorate a text. We only had to write one or two pages, but I didn't like the idea of ending up with a mostly empty manuscript, so I was determined to copy out and illustrate my entire chosen text, namely the poem The Lady of Shalott by Alfred Tennyson (1809 - 1892).

We were supposed to base our decorations on actual medieval manuscripts, but were also given some freedom to improvise, so I did a bit of both - some of my pages are more in the style of medieval work, while others are decidedly modern. I looked at some actual manuscripts to see how some specific decorations, that I wanted to try out, were done.

This one gives one a sense of the style of illustration used, as well as the elaborate stylized leaf pattern decoration (known as rinceau) used in the margin:

Calendar from a Book of Hours, in Latin, on vellum [French Flanders (perhaps region of Binche or Mauberge), c.1450]

This one shows several things: more rinceau design, a decorated initial and some marginal drolleries. These were bizarre, humourous and sometimes blatantly obscene pictures found in the margins of many medieval book pages:

Crucifixion Scene from a French Book of Hours (c 1470) 133x93mm

Here a historiated initial, i.e. an initial with a picture in it. In this case it is an inhabited initial, where the picture is a human or animal:

Illuminated Manuscript, Book of Hours, St George, Walters Manuscript W168

This page shows another form of border decoration, where pictures are more realistic and less stylized:

The poem I copied consists of nineteen verses of nine lines each, and thus, using one page per verse, I could keep pretty much the same layout for every page. Every page contains a decorated initial, and a rubricated one (where an initial is written in a different colour for emphasis - traditionally red was used, but I used other colours as well). I also included an illustration on most pages, and all the pages contain border decorations, some fairly medieval in style, others more modern.

I used modern materials such as watercolour and acrylic paints, and modern ink, but I used a fairly old-fashioned dip pen for writing. I am not at all versed in calligraphy so I just used a "normal" handwriting, but tried to keep it neat and legible.

Here then are my illuminated pages (click on the pictures for the full-sized view), with comments on some of them:

Medieval scribes often used gold leaf for illumination. Unlike medieval scribes, I am not rolling in money, so I used gold craft paint instead. Unfortunately one cannot see the glitter in these photos. In the image below, the decorated initial has quite a bit of gold in it, but it comes across as light brown in the photo. Same thing happened with all the other pages where I used the gold paint:

In this page, and one of the others, I tried some Celtic knot designs in the margin. These were popular as decorations in some medieval books. Unfortunately, they take ages to do, so I had to limit them:

This page contains a historiated initial: the Lady of Shalott makes an appearance in the decorated letter O. The reapers were roughly copied from an original painting by Maggie Laubser (1886 - 1973):

The plain, abstract design behind the weaving lady was often used in medieval manuscripts. Also, I paid no attention to proper perspective, because that is what medieval artists would have done:

The stylized leaf designs here are only vaguely based on medieval examples; I made more authentic-looking ones in other pages.

The border decoration here is an anachronism; tomatoes were unknown in medieval Europe. I did try to get the characters' clothes to look more or less medieval:

The blue colour in the text area is an artifact introduced by the camera, that I couldn't work out how to remove; the original page is white. Also, the darker stars are actually done with gold paint, but one would never guess in this reproduction:

In the poem, several pages are devoted to the appearance of the knight; I didn't want to draw the same character over and over, so I stuck to decorations for some pages, in this case trying my hand at somewhat more authentic-looking rinceau:

The knight on a snail in the left margin is my attempt at a drollery:

The illustration here was roughly copied from the famous original on the theme of the Lady of Shalott, by John William Waterhouse (1849 - 1917):

In the pages above and below my border designs are decidedly un-medieval. But the scroll in the illustration below is not: in the days before speech bubbles, such scrolls were often used to indicate what people were saying:

As in the case of Sir Lancelot, several stanzas of the poem are about the lady floating downriver, so instead of drawing the same picture over and over, I stuck to decorative designs:

And finally, the end, with an illustration that is not exactly medieval in style - I actually found it rather difficult to imitate the medieval style, and developed a new respect for forgers!

Tuesday 20 June 2017

A Medieval project (4)

In the previous part of this project, I worked on the page layout of my fake parchment. For the next part, the instructor wanted students to experiment with various aspects of writing, in preparation for writing the manuscript. In particular, three aspects of writing will be investigated, namely ductus, angle and weight.

1. With ductus is meant the number and direction of pen strokes, as well as the order in which they are made.There are four basic strokes that make up letters: vertical, horizontal, diagonal and curved. With modern ballpoint pens, we tend to forget about ductus, because with these pens, it often does not matter that much - they give a line of uniform appearance, irrespective of how the pen is pulled or pushed on the writing surface.

Individuals will nevertheless develop their own way of doing it. I seem to remember being taught this in primary school as well, though I can't be too sure, as my older brother taught me to read and write before I went to school, and so I never paid much attention in those classes! Nowadays, at least here in South Africa, many schools seem not to put much emphasis anymore on how a pen should be held and how the pen strokes should be made.

As noted above, with ballpoint pens it does not matter as much as with older writing implements such as fountain pens or dip pens, as we shall shortly see.

In the illustration below I indicate the ductus of some letters made with two different implements. The top line shows the basic strokes. In the second line, I indicate the direction and order in which strokes were made. This applies to my own handwriting, and will not be universal with all people.

In the third line I continued the analysis, this time comparing a ballpoint pen with a dip pen. With the ballpoint letters, one hardly needs to indicate ductus, because with a ballpoint the letters can really be formed with a single, continuous stroke. With a dip pen, on the other hand, you rapidly run into trouble if you try to use it in the same way as a ballpoint, because the dip pen nib cannot readily be pushed forward; all strokes must be made with a pulling motion. With the letters in ballpoint, I could use a single motion and just change direction, without having to lift the pen, whereas with the dip pen I had to make separate pen strokes, as indicated.

2. The writing angle refers to the angle at which a pen's nib is held with respect to the horizontal or vertical. As with ductus, in the case of a ballpoint pen it makes no difference, and indeed, because of the symmetrical shape of the ballpoint nib the term doesn't even make much sense when talking about writing done in ballpoint.

With dip pens of the sort used during the Middle Ages, it makes quite a difference, as can be seen in the diagram below. Changing the angle at which the nib is held creates quite different letter shapes. This is particularly noticeable when using broad nib. With thinner nibs the difference is not so apparent.

3. With weight is meant the difference in width between the thinnest and thickest strokes in a script. Scripts where there is no difference or the difference is small is referred to as light scripts, whereas script where the difference is big are considered to be heavy scripts. As can be seen in the diagram, the type of pen used makes a big difference. Ballpoint pens give an even and very light script. In cursive writing with a ballpoint, a slight heaviness can enter if, for example, less pressure is used on upstrokes than downstrokes (as is taught in some schools), so that downstrokes will be slightly broader. However, it hardly noticeable.

With dip pens with flat nibs, the writing is heavier the broader the nib, as can be clearly seen below, despite the fact that I have no experience in writing with these pens and am therefore not exactly skilled at it.

Only one thing remains before I can start to write my manuscript, and that is to choose a text to copy. I decided on Tennyson's poem The Lady of Shalott, which has a medieval theme even though it doesn't date from medieval times. I am going to attempt to copy out and illuminate the entire poem. This will be a project for another post.

Previous posts in this series:

Part 1: Making the parchment

Part 2: Creating quires

Part 3: Preparing the parchment for writing

Part 5: Copying and decoration

Part 6: Binding

Saturday 10 June 2017

How to make medieval-style ink

A commonly used ink in the Middle Ages was iron gall ink; there is an article about it on Wikipedia. The problem is that it uses some ingredients that are not readily available everywhere. For example, here where I live in South Africa, I have no idea where to get hold of oak galls, or iron sulfate for that matter.

So here is recipe that works reasonably well, using some commonly available materials. You will need vinegar, steel wool and tea, plus some suitable containers in which to mix them.

First, take some steel wool, put it into a container and cover it in vinegar. Leave it to react for a week:

Some of the steel wool dissolves in the vinegar, forming iron acetate (I think; my chemistry is as rusty as the gunk that forms in the glass). You will notice that quite a lot of bubbles will form on the surface of the steel wool as the reaction runs, and a rusty mess begins to float on top and sticks to the sides of the glass, which is why it is best to use an old one that you do not want to drink from again. However, lower down the solution is quite clear, and it is this bit that we'll use.

I now brewed up a very strong tea. I used two tea bags for half a mug of water and let it steep for quite a while to get it as strong as possible.One can use such a strong tea as an ink substitute as well, but it tends to be rather on the light side. Based on what I read the early pioneers in South Africa used the leaves of the protea tree instead of tea, and I have a feeling eucalyptus leaves will work as well, or any other leaf that contains a lot of tannins, but I have not tested this personally. I mix the tea with some of the clear steel wool/vinegar solution in a more or less 50:50 mixture:

One has to experiment with different mixtures, because the colour of the ink depends on that, but also on how strong the tea was, and the precise consistency of the steel wool/vinegar mixture, so no two batches ever look precisely alike.

Mostly, one gets a brownish ink, though I have on occasion managed to produce a fairly dark, bluish-black ink as well. One can use various instruments with which to write:

The ink is initially quite light in colour, but it darkens a bit as it dries, rendering the writing quite legible. Note though that as with real medieval ink, it is not archival: the acidity tends to eat into the writing surface, and will in time damage or entirely destroy it.

A Medieval Project (3)

In the previous part of the project, I gathered together my fake parchment into quires; now they have to be prepared to receive text and decoration. The medieval scribes took page layout (manuscript experts prefer the French term mise-en-page) quite seriously and had various mathematical formulas with which they worked out how big the text area should be, where on the page it should go, what shape it should take and so on.

Looking at this example, we can see some common features of medieval page layout:

The text area is not placed symmetrically in the middle of the page, but is shifted upwards and to one side (which side will depend, to some extent, on whether we are looking at a left or right page). One still sees this even in many modern books. A reader usually golds a book at the bottom, so the upward shift facilitates reading. Viewed inside an actual book, this off-centre design can also be more aesthetically pleasing than a perfectly symmetrical one would have been.

Here is another example:

Here we can see that writing was often done in columns, in this case with remarkably few word per column. Apart from that, the page also displays the typical off-centre design. The border may or may not have been utilized for decorations.

For my own page design, I decided to try out a medieval scheme known as the "secret canon." It is in fact not so secret, and there is a Wikipedia page with information about it.

It works as follows. Two facing pages of the manuscript is placed in front of the scribe to form a rectangle:

The diagonals of the rectangle (lines AB and CD) are drawn. Then the diagonals of the two individual pages, (AE and DE) are drawn in. The point F is where lines DE and AB cross, and from this point a vertical line is drawn to point G at the top of the page. From G, a line is drawn to point H, which is the point where the diagonals AE and CD cross. I is the point where the lines GH and DE cross, and this point is used as the starting point with which to construct the text area.

From I, a horizontal line is drawn to point J, where the line reaches diagonal AB. From J, a vertical line is drawn down to point K, where the vertical line meets diagonal DE. From K a horizontal line is drawn to L, a point directly below I. L and I are then connected to form a rectangle inside the page.

The text area on the facing page is a mirror image of the one constructed above.

I did the above construction on an A4 sheet of paper folded in half to form two size A5 pages. My fake manuscript will have the same dimensions. The design as constructed above was slightly awkward to work with because its lines do not fall on easily measured points on a ruler, so I slightly changed it for my own design, but it still looks very much the same.

I then added some ruled lines to write on, as well as a square space for a decorated initial of the sort often seen in medieval manuscripts. Finally, I wrote out a piece of my chosen text to see how it would fit onto the page. I chose Tennyson's poem The Lady of Shalott, the verses of which all consist of nine lines. I found that the first verse did not quite fit into the area; for my final manuscript I'll have to either make the text area a bit larger, or write smaller. For the moment, the design looks like this:

Because of the small size of my pages I decided to only work in a single column per page; I think doing it differently would be awkward and not look very good. My handwriting will also have to look a bit better! I have no knowledge of calligraphy, so I'll just use a normal handwriting, but try to make it as neat as possible. Having experimented a bit, it appears that using rather smaller letters than the ones I used above might look better, which will also solve the problem of the text not fitting into the area.

In the above example, my letters are placed on the lines in the manner we consider normal today. But during medieval times, depending on the time and place, scribes sometimes used their guide lines differently: the line could be used to indicate where the middle of the letter should be, or letters could be "hung from" the line.

On to my actual fake parchment. This brought up another aspect of medieval manuscripts, namely pricking and ruling. One can see evidence of this in many manuscripts from medieval times, such as this one:

Medieval scribes used a sharp instrument like an awl or compass point to prick little holes into pages, which served to show proportions, and where lines for writing would be ruled. They then used various methods to draw these lines, two of which can be seen in this example:

The green arrows point to indented lines scored into the parchment with a sharp instrument. The orange arrows show lines drawn with chalk. For my own manuscript I decided to just use pencil.

It is not clear to me why medieval scribes needed to prick holes in their parchment: if they had materials with which to make lines, like chalk or ink, then surely they could have used these materials to make dots instead of lines? I decided not to prick my manuscript full of holes and just used the point of a pencil to make appropriate marks, which indicate where pin pricks would have gone in a real manuscript.

And thus, two facing pages from my manuscript in progress: