Krakow and nearby

[-JKP-]

Unfortunately, Gothic script was used from England to Naples. I don't know how people WALKING those kind of distances could have spread script styles so widely and quickly, but they did.

When styles changed from pre-Gothic to Gothic, it changed pretty much everywhere. And when it changed from Gothic to the humanist and early modern styles, it changed pretty much everywhere.

I have not been able to figure out how this happened so rapidly and thoroughly, but I have read that there were "wandering scribes". Perhaps these scribes were also giving writing lessons to earn extra money as they traveled.

There must also have been "model books", but I have been unable to find them except for a few. What I do find quite frequently, however, is pen tests in manuscripts. It occurred to me recently that maybe some of them are not "pen tests" as they are usually called. Maybe some of them are exemplars for writing a specific script style.

I do know that professional scribes were encouraged to copy each other as closely as possible so several scribes could work on the same project without too many disruptions for the reader. Of course, many of the surviving manuscripts are compilations. Collectors grab them from numerous sources and have them bound together, so anthologies tend to be in many hands.


I've sampled several manuscripts where the bibliographers and historians have no idea where they are from because the style of writing was so widely dispersed.

Once paper became available, it became a little easier to locate origins, because each paper mill had its own watermark. But parchment doesn't have this. Unfortunately, not all the repositories photograph or comment on the watermarks.