#palaeography

okay what did i miss

I simply can't seem to find reliable sources myself – perhaps such an item type does not exist, but I swear I saw some photos online of purpose-made pouches for easy book access while travelling (tied to a belt, I think).

Absolutely non-urgent ask; you're just the person who I think is most likely to know, or to know someone who does!

I feel like I have previously known more about this, but the only thing coming to mind right now is the Fadden More Psalter, an early Irish manuscript found in a bog which has a kind of wraparound leather cover with straps and horn buttons. The manuscript itself wasn't bound to the cover; the pages are bound together but just stored inside the cover, as I understand it, so it's more of a pouch than a binding. It's also a really interesting one because the cover was lined with papyrus to stiffen it, showing how far-reaching their trade for materials was. There's some info about it on the National Museum of Ireland website; they say there are illustrations in other manuscripts suggesting this kind of cover was used for other manuscripts at the time too.

(Also, check out these pictures of the absolute mess this manuscript was in and how hard conservation was. Oof.)

They also found a leather satchel in the area that might have been used to carry the manuscript. While trying to find more of that, I found this blog post by Erik Kwakkel about medieval book carrying methods -- this might be what you're looking for, perhaps? It sounds like you're looking for a girdle book; here's another post about those. From what I can see, it's more that the binding itself is constructed to allow carrying rather than a separate pouch. Otherwise, I get the impression that they would have used leather satchels a lot of the time, unless it's something really special that's going to have a whole fancy case.

It's possible some of my followers might have more resources on this, though! Alas all my codicology notes from my MA are handwritten and that makes it harder for me to look things up 😅

Until I've learned that Victorian sometimes did the abominable thing called crosswriting and I decided that, in the end, I chose right because deciphering this? Couldn't be me!

So, anyway, there is an ask in all this: have you ever made a post or spoken about how you go about reading and deciphiring all these letters? Any tricks to it? Is it just staring until the words start to make sense, do you use a software?

I need to know, this is driving me crazy and I am now convinced you have some alien brain because... that calligraphy would NOT get past my third grade teacher 😩. Are you human?

Love your work!

Hello! Owww thank you so much for the compliments. ❤️ I haven't done a post about palaeography, but I now want to submit a proposal to do a workshop about it at Terror Camp, in combination with talking about my Fitzjames research. Let's see if that will get accepted! Afterwards I will publish a tutorial online.

What I can say is that when I started out 3 years ago I had never read/transcribed handwritten sources before, and when seeing Fitzjames' handwriting I thought "how am I supposed to be able to read that?! 😭" I was never taught how to do this when I studied Art History, nor during my current Naval History MA.

The thing is that it takes time to get acquainted with somebody's handwriting, and after a while you'll be able to read things that you couldn't before. You start by transcribing the words you can read, and try and recognise the letters in the words you cannot. Sometimes I'll all of a sudden be able to read a word after having stared at it for years! Victory!

I never use software, because A. That feels like cheating to me. B. I tried to put a letter by William Coningham through Transkribus and all I got was gibberish so I'd better do it myself. (Even AI is like Will Con what the hell, man?) C. It feels so rewarding when you've mastered the skill of transcribing horrible handwriting. You did that, not AI! You're not dependant on AI! 👏

Mich. Ms. 30, full illumination depicting John the Evangelist, fol. 306v. Gospels and biblical and patristic commentaries. [Northern Greece], May 31, 1430.

Mich. Ms. 13, fol. 1r. Lectionary of the Gospels, fragment. Second half of the 10th c.

A life restoration of Asteriornis I made for Wikipedia.

But beginning in the 1950s, more than 100 fragments from 11 different parchment scrolls of the Book of Enoch, written largely in Aramaic, were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. A few fragments were relatively large—15 to 20 lines of text—but most were much smaller, ranging in size from a piece of toast to a postage stamp. Someone had to transcribe, translate and annotate all this “Enochic” material—and Langlois’ teacher volunteered him. That’s how he became one of just two students in Paris learning Ge’ez.

Langlois quickly grasped the numerous parallels between Enoch and other books of the New Testament; for instance, Enoch mentions a messiah called the “son of man” who will preside over the Final Judgement. Indeed, some scholars believe Enoch was a major influence on early Christianity, and Langlois had every intention to conduct that type of historical research.

He started by transcribing the text from two small Enoch fragments, but age had made parts of it hard to read; some sections were missing entirely. In the past, scholars had tried to reconstruct missing words and identify where in the larger text these pieces belonged. But after working out his own readings, Langlois noticed the fragments seemed to come from parts of the book that were different from those specified by earlier scholars. He also wondered if their proposed readings could even fit on the fragments they purportedly came from. But how could he tell for sure?

To faithfully reconstruct the text of Enoch, he needed digital images of the scrolls—images that were crisper and more detailed than the printed copies inside the books he was relying on. That was how, in 2004, he found himself traipsing around Paris, searching for a specialized microfiche scanner to upload images to his laptop. Having done that (and lacking cash to buy Photoshop), he downloaded an open-source knockoff.

First, he individually outlined, isolated and reproduced each letter on Fragment 1 and Fragment 2, so he could move them around his screen like alphabet refrigerator magnets, to test different configurations and to create an “alphabet library” for systematic analysis of the script. Next, he began to study the handwriting. Which stroke of a given letter was inscribed first? Did the scribe lift his pen, or did he write multiple parts of a letter in a continuous gesture? Was the stroke thick or thin?

Then Langlois started filling in the blanks. Using the letters he’d collected, he tested the reconstructions proposed by scholars over the preceding decades. Yet large holes remained in the text, or words were too big to fit in the available space. The “text” of the Book of Enoch as it was widely known, in other words, was in many cases mistaken.

Take the story of a group of fallen angels who descend to earth to seduce beautiful women. Using his new technique, Langlois discovered that earlier scholars had gotten the names of some of the angels wrong, and so had not realized the names were derived from Canaanite gods worshipped in the second millennium B.C.—a clear example of the way scriptural authors integrated elements of the cultures that surrounded them into their theologies. “I didn’t consider myself a scholar,” Langlois told me. “I was just a student wondering how we could benefit from these technologies.” Eventually, Langlois wrote a 600-page book that applied his technique to the oldest known scroll of Enoch, making more than 100 “improvements,” as he calls them, to prior readings.

His next book, even more ambitious, detailed his analysis of Dead Sea Scrolls fragments containing snippets of text from the biblical Book of Joshua. From these fragments he concluded that there must be a lost version of Joshua, previously unknown to scholars and extant only in a small number of surviving fragments. Since there are thousands of authentic Dead Sea Scrolls, it appears that much still remains to be learned about the origins of early biblical texts. “Even the void is full of information,” Langlois told me.