RE: Marginal 16r?
-JKP- > 16-07-2018, 02:29 AM
It's the thick and thin shapes that distinguish calligraphic writing from simple writing with a quill.
Those who were not expert, like the main text writers and the marginalia writer, don't hold the quill correctly to optimize the contrast between the thick and thin shapes as the pen is moved. Also, connecting the letters in a certain way (stroke direction, for example), also emphasizes this characteristic. Medieval book-hand scribes were good at it (the late 15th-century French scribes were very good at it). That's why their script almost always looks different from cursive scripts. Even when they draw the same shapes, they draw them so the balance between the vertical and horizontal strokes takes advantage of the dynamic range (from thin to thick) of the quill.
Note how nicely the last downstroke on the "h" in the above example is thin-thick at the top and then tapers very gradually and elegantly as it becomes thinner toward the bottom. Even when the VMS marginalia writer drew a good book-form "g" (in which the shapes are correct and well done), the thick-thin balance was not properly used to enhance the transitions.
Now look at the VMS "h" (the one with the tail). The shape is basically right, but he goofed up the ascender and turned the quill a little too much so it's too thin at the top-left. The example on this page has a more evenly thick ascender, done the way a calligrapher would do it. I think it's pretty clear the marginalia writer was not a professional scribe. Uneven balance, quill turning this way and that.
Of course, that doesn't mean that all professional scribes were good at it... the Lauber studio (mid-15th century) was a commercial manuscript copying studio, yet none of the handwriting comes up to the professional standards of the various ecclesiastical scriptoria where they were trained in book hands but even the Lauber scribes, as hasty as they were, were more consistent than the marginalia writer.