This isn’t what I’m used to

When digital watches first came out, some of them had a digitally-animated fake-analogue display. That style of watch had images of hour- and minute-hands that appeared to sweep around its face. People weren’t ready to read numbers to know the time. They needed a few years to get used to the new way of doing things.

Back when we were talking about Johannes Gutenberg and William Caxton, you could see that they tried to make their books look like they were hand-written by a bunch of scribes.

A rare sighting of scribes in the field

What is the collective noun for scribes? Best answer wins a sketch. https://readable.com/blog/a-murder-of-crows-and-other-odd-collective-nouns/

https://www.watchuseek.com/threads/watches-with-a-digital-display-that-mimic-the-hour-hands-of-a-non-digital-analogue-watch.4744371/

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Don’t forget: I wrote another Western Civ User’s Guide! Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Time & Space.

A fine romance

‘Salve’ is Latin for ‘hello’ (so it says on the interwebs) but it doesn’t really fit with the others. Maybe I should have written ‘die enim bona’ (good day).

Back when we were all a lot younger I observed that across the Holy Roman Empire, Latin was turning into vernacular regional languages. Frankish people were speaking something like French, the Alemanni were speaking something like German…meanwhile, good old Latin Classic® was still the language of the Church and government and music and literature. So once again the shmoes got left behind. If you went to Mass, it was celebrated in Latin. The hymns were sung in Latin. Everyone in government spoke Latin; royal edicts were decreed in Latin. If you were sued, the judge heard your case in Latin; the lawyers spoke Latin. If you saw a doctor he’d consult with his colleagues in Latin. All the books, even ones read for entertainment, were written in Latin.

By the way, whenever you come across the term ‘romance language,’ it means a language that grew out of Latin. https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/romance-languages
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-e&q=english+latin+translation

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And more Goth

Lately Goth is become a fashion adopted by art students: pale skin and dyed-black hair, heavy on the eye liner and black lipstick, black leather jackets and black skinny jeans.

My pal Chuck Dillon is an illustrator and art teacher. You’ve seen his work in Highlights magazine. He let me include his drawing of a typical Goth art student in today’s post.

If you think that’s funny, he has a whole book of art student types he’s taught over the years. It’s titled ‘Which Art Student Are You?’ and you can get your own copy here.

https://www.encyclopedia.com/reference/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/gothic-romance
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3w0hye

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Last night I dreamt I read Manders’ blog again

Run away, girl!

Side note: The Gothic novel is a genre of 19th-century literature that is dark, moody and creepy-romantic. Horror novels like Frankenstein and Dracula fit into the genre. Gothic stories often take place in castles (a ton of them feature a young woman who comes to live in a remote, haunted mansion full of dark, shameful family secrets), so maybe that’s how the genre came to be named. Lots of dark shadows, lots of bats. Not for nothing does Batman operate out of Gotham City.

https://reedsy.com/discovery/blog/gothic-literature
https://bookriot.com/what-is-gothic-fiction/
https://www.encyclopedia.com/reference/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/gothic-romance
https://www.thebookseller.com/feature/rebecca-extract-338986

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How barbaric

Kind of funny: the ‘Renaissance’ is the historical period in Europe following the Middle Ages. It’s a French word meaning ‘rebirth.’ This cultural rebirth was of everything Roman: frescoes, sculpture, poetry, the sciences, and architecture. Promoters of the Renaissance thought to make their new movement look good by making the preceding centuries look bad. The Mediæval period got dubbed ‘the Dark Ages.’

Renaissance architects started using Roman arches again (instead of the pointed Gothic arch). They liked the old southern Roman basilicas and disliked the northern mediæval style of architecture and calligraphy. Those fancy-pants Renaissance promoters thought the northern style looked barbaric, so they called it by the name of the northerners’ barbarian ancestors—Gothic. The insult stuck. We still use ‘Gothic’ today to describe the buildings and the typeface.

Apologies to Robert E. Howard
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Howard

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Black Letter

This is rough—just the lowercase letters. You can see that the space between the letters equals the width of a vertical stroke. When they’re together, it’s hard to distinguish i,m,n,u,v & w. I think that’s why they started dotting i & j.

I imagine at some point a German scribe looked at a tall, skinny cathedral and thought, “Huh. If I made lettering tall and skinny, we’d fit a ton more words onto a page. Think of the parchment we’d save!” and so Black Letter was born. Black Letter (or Gothic, or Fraktur, or Textura) typically has the exact same thickness of white space between vertical strokes as the thickness of each vertical stroke. The effect on a page is pleasing but a little hard to read.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackletter#/media/File:Calligraphy.malmesbury.bible.arp.jpg

http://www.designhistory.org/Handwriting_pages/Blackletter.html
https://jakerainis.com/blog/the-history-of-blackletter-calligraphy/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackletter
If you’d like to try your hand at writing Blackletter, here are free downloadable worksheets:
https://jakerainis.com/blog/learning-blackletter-alphabets/

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Lettering as sweet as the dew on the vine, so it is

You can still find the uncial style of writing every March on Saint Patrick’s Day cards and furniture-sale advertisements. Uncial style looks Irish. It was popular with the Irish monks.

Uncials

The old-style square-cap Latin was written in all capital letters, as if the ‘caps lock’ button were on the whole time. It reads like you’re being yelled at (maybe that was the idea).

In Alcuin’s day, monks wrote on parchment. Parchment isn’t cheap and all-caps takes up a lot of space. The monks learned to conserve space by making the first letter of a sentence a big capital letter and writing the rest of the sentence in small letters. The small letters were only an inch high—an ‘uncia’ in Latin—so this style of writing is called ‘uncial’ (OON se al).*

Uncials. Look how round they are compared to the Latin square-caps.

The small letters are called miniscules. The monks formed them with pens, so they became more round in contrast to the chiseled-in-stone letters of the old days. The miniscules grew tails, like ‘d’ or ‘p’ which extended up or down. They look different from capital letters.

The big capital letters are called maguscules MAH-juss-kyoolz). In time the maguscules became large versions of the miniscules.

This is the style Alcuin updated to Carolingian and promoted across the Holy Roman Empire. Latin translations of Arabic texts would be written in the Carolingian style. Alcuin dreamed up an additional feature: punctuation. Thanks to Alcuin you can tell when sentences end and new ones begin because they’re marked with a period. You can tell if the writer is asking a question, because there’s a question mark at the end. I’m personally grateful for the M-dash—which I probably overuse.

*…or maybe the monks shouldn’t be taken too literally. ‘Uncial’ may have been their jokey way of saying the letters are small.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/uncial
https://www.britannica.com/topic/uncial
http://www.designhistory.org/Handwriting_pages/Uncials.html
http://www.designhistory.org/Handwriting_pages/Carolingian.html
https://www.britannica.com/topic/majuscule
I wanted to get a take on uncials from a calligrapher. Here’s that wonderful lady who makes her own ink. She says it’s St Jerome’s fault they’re called uncials. She shows you how to write them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU-dHTEkAx0&t=335s
You weirdos who’ve been loyally following this blog will no doubt remember this post:
https://johnmanders.wordpress.com/2019/07/04/measuring-distance-in-rome/

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We’re going to need more books

Charlemagne wanted to promote a culture of learning throughout France and then the Holy Roman Empire. He didn’t have tv or the internet to spread this learning around, so Charlemagne would need to use books. Many of those old books from classical times (during the Greek & Roman Empires) were hard or impossible to find.

° Bad news: Charlemagne was made aware that many original manuscripts of ancient writers and philosophers had been lost or destroyed—like when the library at Alexandria got torched. Probably Alcuin and the other teachers told him.
° Good news: Charlemagne was made aware that copies of these ancient manuscripts existed in the Near- and MidEast, translated into Arabic. Probably Alcuin again.
° Plan of action: Charlemagne and Alcuin began an empire-wide program of finding the Arabic copies and translating them into Latin.

As I mentioned a few posts back, written Latin had taken on a different character in every different kingdom—it didn’t look like the square-cap Latin chiselled into a column that Julius Caesar would have recognized. Copying and translating these Arabic manuscripts would be a golden opportunity to standardize writing—get everybody in the empire writing the same way. Here’s the thing: instead of making all the monks go back to square-cap Latin, Alcuin had a different idea. He noticed that a lot of those regional writing quirks made Latin easier to read.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25669.How_the_Irish_Saved_Civilization
https://omniglot.com/writing/latin2.htm
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-hccc-worldhistory/chapter/charlemagnes-reforms/

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Gall and vitriol!

In the world of art supplies, a liquid medium like ink is pigment + binder + solvent. Pigment is color. In iron gall ink, the black pigment is created by the chemical reaction when vitriol (iron sulphate) is added to water that had gall-nuts steeping in it.

The binder holds the ingredients together. You might remember the Egyptians got the sap, or gum, from acacia trees which they dried and ground into powder—Gum Arabic. Gum Arabic is the binder for iron gall ink. The powder is mixed with vinegar before adding it to the inky water.

The acid from gall-nuts (and vinegar, too) eats into the vellum very slightly, so the pigment stays put.

Water is the solvent. You can thin iron gall ink with water. After it dries, though, it’s waterproof. If you goof you have to scrape it off with a knife.

Here are links to iron gall ink recipes:

https://recipes.hypotheses.org/8935
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7k4-wj8mZ8
Isn’t she wonderful? This lady found a medieval recipe for iron gall ink and decided to cook it up herself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo9rbRRCBv8
https://www.medievalists.net/2015/09/how-to-make-ink-in-the-middle-ages/

Here’s where you can get the ingredients online. CHECK WITH YOUR PARENTS before you start playing with caustic chemicals that can burn a hole through the kitchen counter, you weirdos!
https://www.etsy.com/listing/786632766/oak-gall-35-oz-brownish-white-gallnut?gpla=1&gao=1&&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=shopping_us_b-craft_supplies_and_tools-paints_inks_and_dyes-dyes&utm_custom1=_k_Cj0KCQiAj9iBBhCJARIsAE9qRtDhCL1puzg69VQp90T-th542MUw5Rc1l2Z5-FqHllw8I1s_u-575mgaAifyEALw_wcB_k_&utm_content=go_11502762686_119128326464_476190472988_aud-966866687014:pla-297542836984_c__786632766_12768591&utm_custom2=11502762686&gclid=Cj0KCQiAj9iBBhCJARIsAE9qRtDhCL1puzg69VQp90T-th542MUw5Rc1l2Z5-FqHllw8I1s_u-575mgaAifyEALw_wcB
https://www.gumarabicusa.com/buy-now#buy-gum-arabic
https://www.homesciencetools.com/product/iron-ii-ferrous-sulfate-30-g/?gclid=Cj0KCQiAj9iBBhCJARIsAE9qRtA45C0COBF4UGN4E3CaUx5wSoVZbTfHQatWuNOSqgsmAtYzz-jg4xwaAp40EALw_wcB

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_gall_ink

There’s a charm in the old words of these recipes. They were once used to describe chemicals and today they describe attitude or a way of speaking or acting:
vitriol https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vitriol
gall https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gall

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