Month names collection / metastudy

[davidma]

What to make of something like this? The "e"'s are spiky and it's the same script type, only less cursive. But whenever there's a "y", it gets some kind of variable diacritic on it. In one case on the page I was looking at, it looks like a circumflex, but I don't know if that's a coincidence. Maybe the accents have something to do with pronunciation? 

This looks to me like the "long y" mentioned by Beaulieux in his Histoire, i.e. scribes used it instead of the i when appropriate since it was easier to write, interesting to see it in a document from 1510 but that goes to show that demarcation lines were blurred and these two tendencies (i.e. standardisation of accents on the one hand and older scripts/writing practices on the other) are likely to have coexisted for a long time. The first essay on accents in French dates from 1505 (always according to Beaulieux) but it was practically ignored, as were subsequent efforts before 1533.