I think if you write with a crystal or a reading stone, the line on the parchment will not hold. And that you then orientate yourself on the top line.
OK fair enough Anton and Marco, unrelated illustrations was a reach. It's also kind of tangential to my main point — which I'll stand by — that a notebook of tabular data can explain not only multi-pass, but also LAAFU effects. It might also explain why there are so few corrections.
There's a great deal of tabular data in medieval documents: tax records, real estate transactions, obits, accounts, calendars, canon tables, indexes, wappen books, moon charts, pledges, easter-calculation charts.
Obituaries were sometimes written in variable-sized blocks on several parts of a folio at different times by different people.
It may not relate well to blocks of different sizes and shapes (especially if some are diagonal), but the general notion of groups of data added at various times on various parts of the page certainly existed.
f105r is a good example of multipass, especially the third paragraph which is a desperate mess!
You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view.
(05-05-2020, 09:39 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There's a great deal of tabular data in medieval documents: tax records, real estate transactions, obits, accounts, calendars, canon tables, indexes, wappen books, moon charts, pledges, easter-calculation charts.
Obituaries were sometimes written in variable-sized blocks on several parts of a folio at different times by different people.
It may not relate well to blocks of different sizes and shapes (especially if some are diagonal), but the general notion of groups of data added at various times on various parts of the page certainly existed.
At least that part is not an anachronism, then.
I remember visiting one of those historical villages once, which attempted to replicate everyday rural life in Colonial America. There was a bookbinder there, and to this day I still remember one thing she taught me: For most of their history, the majority of bound paper books were personal notebooks, and thus were bound empty. Before the industrial revolution, many literate people carried a notebook / diary around to record all sorts of important information they didn't want to forget. But this postdates the widespread production of affordable paper. Back when the only writing surfaces were parchment, wax tablets, and chalkboards, none of which were cheap or plentiful, does our concept of a "notebook" generalize to anything a literate person would have known?
I'm likely going to flesh out this notebook theory into its own thread eventually, but not before I read up on the history of the notebook, and look for specimens of the medieval European equivalent which have been digitized.
(05-05-2020, 09:41 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.f105r is a good example of multipass, especially the third paragraph which is a desperate mess!
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
It looks like the top-right halfline of paragraph three was written after the the first line of the paragraph. The text goes around the gallows.
What could be the purpose of that? I can see how it contributes to the aesthetics of the page, viz. to fill in a gap, but I'm drawing a blank for a good plaintext or meaning-related reason for it.
(06-05-2020, 07:39 AM)Stephen Carlson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (05-05-2020, 09:41 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.f105r is a good example of multipass, especially the third paragraph which is a desperate mess!
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
It looks like the top-right halfline of paragraph three was written after the the first line of the paragraph. The text goes around the gallows.
What could be the purpose of that? I can see how it contributes to the aesthetics of the page, viz. to fill in a gap, but I'm drawing a blank for a good plaintext or meaning-related reason for it.
I agree, it looks like the halfline leaves perfectly fitting spaces for the gallows intruding from below. On the other hand, the line below makes a drastic curve to avoid the halfline above. Maybe just the first vord of the halfline was written first, then the line below and then the right part of the halfline?
It has a general look of that some portions of text were missed and awkwardly "inserted" afterwards.
The ot of line 3 was evidently written in the second pass, and I'm not surprised if it was written even after line 1 of the next paragraph was written, because it makes a substantial jump over qokeeody. By the way, one can see a notable difference in tint (and text density!) between first three paragraphs (darker) and the subsequent paragraphs (lighter).
chey teear ykedy ry of line 2 was written after ot.
Next the scribe, still proceeding BTT, comes to filling the rest of line 1, of which the last vord written in the first pass seems to be polaiin. He writes keeey dyaiin, taking a slightly increased space from polaiin to reduce the slope and to make it look more like a coherent line written in a single pass. Next he discovers that he missed the pol, and so he awkwardly fits it into the space between polaiin and keeey. Another possibility is that polkeeey is a single vord, so the line 1 is just filled normally in the BTT fashion. The "pol" part of it is just fit to the left of the lower t, in order for the l in pol not to interfere with the t.
Next comes this "halfline 0" which is awkwardly fit in between gallows of line 1, lest it becomes part of the last line of the preceding paragraph 2. Why would the halfline 0 come in place, to begin with? Maybe the length of the second pass text was such that it could not be fit into three lines? However, there is free space in line 3 yet. All in all, looks like some miscalculation or omission.
Also, when you look at the stars, some of them align quite good with the supposed first line of the paragraph, most are a bit too high, especially the 3rd one. And the last ist either way too high or belongs to what looks like the last line of the paragraph. All in all I get the impression that they were either placed a bit sloppy or prior to the writing, which could be a sign of copying, because they fit reasonably good.
(Probably has already been discussed here somewhere, but I just noticed it)
We had some discussion about the stars indeed, but I don't remember what were the conclusions, if any. At any rate, they were not groundbreaking. I only remember we did the count with
VViews 