Seems like. Ladies and gentlemen, if we're sitting comfortably, then we'll begin.
My name is Richard Ovenden, I'm a police librarian and I'm also speaking to you this evening here in the Western Library of the Brooklyn Library.
As the chair of the electors to the loyal readership, and it's my pleasure indeed to welcome you here.
Both those of you are here in the Civic to lecture theatre and all of also those of you joining us online.
I welcome you very much indeed for the last of the line lectures for twenty nineteen twenty twenty.
These lectures were, of course, originally intended for physical delivery in the usual fashion in Trinity term of 2020,
but for some reason, which I can't now remember.
Alternative measures had to be developed to ensure that we could honour the intentions of our benefactor and the founder of these lectures,
JPR Lyle, in delivering the annual lecture series. Four lectures were eventually screened from Professor Smith's academic base in Paris to a large,
internationally spread audience online during late September and early October 2020.
The first of these lectures would have included an invitation from me to all of you to join us for drinks in the Bodleian Library.
But back in September 2020, that was not possible.
But I did promise you solemnly on that occasion, ladies and gentlemen,
that the long reader would deliver his final lecture in person and that we would share an
adult beverage in the form of a vent on air for Professor Smith together in Blackwell.
Ladies and gentlemen, here we are at last able to deliver that promise before we move on to the specifics of this evening's lecture.
Allow me to explain a little of the background and history to the lectures.
James Pialligo was a lawyer and book collectors lived in Oxford, announced his retirement in Abingdon.
He not only collected books in a serious way, but also studied them closely,
publishing his research, for example, on early book illustration in Spain in 1925.
Over 100 of his best mediaeval manuscripts were bequeathed to the body on his death in 1948,
and the library subsequently purchased another 60 manuscripts and many other early printed books from his executives, Tilly de la Mer.
Then on, the staff of the Modlin, published the scholarly catalogue of the mediaeval manuscripts in 1971.
In addition to this great generosity to the bodily in JPR,
Lyle also left a bequest to establish a series of lectures in the overfeed to be delivered by invitation by leading scholars working in the field.
To this end, the university established a board select board of Electors to review the state
of scholarship and to invite the leading proponents to hold the readership.
It is this body one that I have chose since 2013, but you, Professor Smith, to give the 2020 lectures.
James Lyle would certainly have approved of the choice of our lecturer, Professor Mark Smith.
He has been since 2013. Professor of mediaeval and modern parly overfished the Ecole Nationalité shaft and director of
studies at the École Pratique des Attitude section of historical and physiological sciences.
Professor Smith was educated at the École Tissot with a thesis entitled La France as a Civilisation View A Parlays Italian OCZ m.K in 1988,
and he then worked at the Archive Nationale from 1989 1988 to 1994, either in red for his doctorate at the École Pratique des Études,
with a thesis on late Italian ellagic of the Tour de la France of VMC eight
Geography Voyage a Representation de la Spice in 1993 and from 1995 to '98,
he became general secretary of the Ecole Nazionale Deshpande before taking up the chair, which he now holds.
He's also taught at the University of Paris, Sorbonne at Columbia University and as head of the Melanson Institute in Vernacular Palio,
Griffey at the Newberry Library and also at the Getty Research Institute.
Professor Smith serves his profession more than simply his own academic appointments.
He's president of the Comité Internationale de Palio, Rafi Latine,
a member of the Committee on Hebrew Radiography and a former president of the society to the Strada
France and a member of the editorial boards of Script Tourism and of the Gazette du Leave Media.
Professor Smith has published widely in the fields of the evolution of the Latin alphabet and of inscriptions, handwriting and on typography.
Ladies and gentlemen, I have great pleasure in inviting Professor Mark Smith to deliver the last of the 2019 2020 lectures.
The overall title of those lectures is writing models from manuscript to print France, England and Europe circa 4500 to 18 countries.
Ladies and gentlemen, join me in welcoming. But many thanks, Richard,
for the introduction for the the reminder for those who might have heard an introduction two years ago and might have forgotten about it.
In the meantime, so ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues and friends, since I can see many colleagues and friends in the room.
Good evening. I'm especially pleased that we are coming to the close of this longest ever run of lectures started in September 2020,
leapfrogging the wonderful Paul Needham season, and that at last we meet face to face.
The first four lectures, if memory can reach that far back,
focussed in large part on bibliographical issues relating to writing books as seemed fitting for a loyal readership in bibliography.
In this last episode, I intend to shift back to the kind of question that first attracted me to writing books.
That is questions of Palio Griffey. What can a survey of hundreds of writing modules each created, taught or published at one point in time and space?
Tell us that might help us to describe and explain the broader landscape of written forms over space and time.
They offer more or less detailed technical instructions plates of writing from the master's hand reproduced for imitation and often,
but not always, they pin names onto scripts names that make sense in context.
At that moment and place, which can be misleading if you rely on them to guide you through time and space.
Names are sticky. They tend to remain in use, sometimes for centuries, while scripts change.
On the other hand, similar scripts can also be called different names by different people in different places and even in different times based
on changing notions of where those scripts came from or how they look or how they are done or what they should be used for.
Names that suggest form, style or technique can also be vague and confusing.
How cursive is italic chancery cursive? It depends on the date ascribes achieve greater passivity.
The script, previously considered fast, might be downgraded in speed and at the same time upgraded in dignity as a more formal or even sketch script.
Round hand falls into the category of confusing descriptive names.
It has nothing in common with Rotunda owned Redondo,
first developed by English writing masters around 7500 and rapidly adopted for common use, as you can see in this 75.
This is one of the only, maybe the only slide I have of female writing,
and it's very similar to all the male writing we're going to see as a model for ladies in the 18th century.
It was originally a script in the Italian tradition and round called round in two respects.
It was less spiky than secretary.
The common gothic cursive of the 16th and 17th century, the English offshoot of a late mediaeval French chancery script.
It was more full bodied and less compressed than most italic scripts of the time, which is another aspect of roundness.
Its defining features are its slope.
Connexions, between letters and between strokes, within letters in the form of thin upward hair lines and the open bowl of pee at the closed bowl.
Here being if both bills hit close, one being used in the larger, less cursive form node usually is round text.
The senders might be looped or not, depending on size and passivity, and that, all in all is essentially the model I was taught at the age of seven.
After moving from Britain to the continent. The round hand came into use on the continent in the late 18th century, under the names,
John Glaze is key to the English and English left to right Glaser names that suggest origin national names might carry prestige or less so,
depending on your opinion of other nations.
Scripts can be adopted or rejected by communities according to connotation, and labelling is part of the process.
Looking further afield, the German Gothic tradition offers maybe the most striking example.
Another offshoot of the same France with chants of same sorry French chancery script I mentioned earlier,
promoted in the early 16th century by imperial authority in the form of factual,
national and religious sentiment kept it alive for centuries as the deutscher shift until it was abolished by Nazi authorities.
Ironically, but for practical reasons. In 1941, by swapping labels and calling it just on that single last day, the Shabab wouldn't shift.
Despite which German gothic letter forms remained associated with grim memories
to the extent that they stayed out of favour until the end of that century,
when graphic designers once again realised their aesthetic potential, and some of you might know the seminal book [INAUDIBLE] two of Mon Amour.
The name Gothic itself, of course, has its own history, but that would lead us further astray.
I shall use it on a few occasions for convenience.
As for publication, anglaise as we'll see later on the naming process itself reflected French attitudes towards Britain.
Finally, back to form technique and style, the main innovation of 18th century masters was the use of a quill cut to a fine point.
And the production of full bodied minimalist shafts and curves by applying some pressure
to spread the tines of the quill rather than relying on the full stroke of a broad nib.
The difficulty with the broad nib in cursive handwriting, of course, was the hair lines, especially in upward strokes and loops.
The fine nib made all that simpler and faster and produced a uniform and light and pleasing texture.
That technique and style is still in use amongst calligraphers today, but under the name copperplate.
By now, a traditional and apparently neutral description, it actually originated as a term of disparagement,
meaning a style supposed to have been perfected by and for the burin rather than the pen.
A notion both writing masters and engravers were already constantly disputing in the 18th century.
The name copperplate only became common in the 20th century, it seems, after Edward Johnston revived broad calligraphy.
And Alfred Fairbank and others started to advocate 16th century italic chancery scripts in schools.
Copperplate then became associated with a dull mechanical Victorian traditions.
To this day, broadness been pointed NIB calligraphers carry on the age honoured tradition of stylistic and personal strife between scribes.
In between Italian Renaissance models and the Victorian style of round hand historical scripts from 50 60, say,
to 1800 are now no man's land, with very few calligraphers exploiting the amazing diversity of letter forms from the period.
Partly no doubt because many of them have become difficult to read or too exotic and
would serve no practical purpose who would pay for a wedding invitation in secretary?
I'm sorry to add, not many geographers are interested, either,
at least the most formal and legible round hands of the 18th century of inspired recent type designers and been revived in such
typefaces as Snell round hand Shelley script champion script becomes script all the names of the great 18th century writing masters.
Some historians, including Stanley Morrison, have written about the round hand in the 18th century,
but without going into much detail concerning its roots, development and circulation and the reliance on names and on texts.
Introductory texts from matter in writing books have somewhat muddied the waters.
I would like to approach the question from a more visual angle, together with a group of students at the school platitudes issued,
including professional calligraphers whose observations I treasure.
We've spent months peering at minimums, loops, pentangle, connecting strokes,
lines swelling to different degrees in different different directions and trying to identify the processes that transformed a mix of
elements borrowed from England's closest neighbours into something new that was later exported back to all of Europe and America.
I don't intend to inflict on you the detailed analysis of hundreds of samples of English handwriting.
I would rather try and flesh out the wider context in which they appeared so as to so as to understand where
where those masters looked for inspiration and how they reworked their models into that uniquely British blend.
My first lecture was an invitation to look beyond national boundaries in late mediaeval and early modern palaeontology.
We now return to that theme.
The distribution and circulation of scripts like languages or any other social and cultural forms reflects relationships of exchange,
antagonism or domination and the balance of power, wealth and prestige.
A brief reminder The time around 1500 has seen the rise of distinct national styles.
In the gothic tradition. Cursive documentary Everyday Scripts became so different as to limit their use of specific lines and languages.
International communications still use the Latin language, of course, partly supplemented by Italian, and it used Italian letter forms.
The kind of letter forms we see in this book, published in 15 40 50 40, would be.
The first edition is literal military, not etc. by MacArthur, the famous mapmaker.
So an Italian script produced in Antwerp.
Humanistic, minuscule and coercive, then Rome and italic type used for Latin first from around 4500 and then for Italian were
widely adopted for most European languages in the 16th century alongside the national scripts.
Nor should we assume that readers just found them easier to read as we do or even to write.
Some italic scripts were highly sophisticated. Others more elementary and the same goes for gothic.
Italy exported scripts and imported none, the foreign examples illustrated in 15:40 by Abraham Battista Palladino,
for instance, were for show and curiosity, not for teaching in other countries, notably France and England.
Institutions kept a tradition. While the Italian scripts might be used in literature, private communication,
international trade diplomacy and were taken up by specific social categories, particularly the nobility and women.
Foreign scripts,
which were neither local nor international were taught whenever they appeared useful for dealing with foreign countries in their own languages,
German lords or merchants of the 18th century could hardly expect their French counterparts to read a letter in German,
and writing French words in an illegible German script would have been pointless.
A generic Italian scripts could do, but if you could write a French script, that would be even more polite.
On that subject, also writing books are a good place to start,
since the plates tend to illustrate scripts in the appropriate languages and genres of texts or documents.
So even when no label is provided, one can identify a legal script from a legal text,
and a French text is the sign of a French or supposedly French script, even when you're looking at an ill defined imitation by a German Penman.
Interest in foreign scripts follows trade routes and comes together in multilingual centres of commercial and political business.
The one area and time in which writing books systematically surveyed the scripts of every major power in Europe is the low countries north and south.
In the late 60s and early 17th century.
Which is what we see, for instance, here in 15 94 in Holland, use the bathroom are described in the in nine languages.
Students in the low countries could go to Latin schools, French schools, Dutch schools,
but they're writing books showed all three varieties plus Italian, German, Spanish.
Even after the northern provinces had broken free from Spain in 1981 and to a lesser extent, even English writing meaning at the time secretary.
The greatest, most of the time. Jan Vanden, vendor in the first two decades of the 17th century,
turned out a body of work extraordinary as the variety and stylistic adherence to the original scripts,
together with an unsurpassed sense of ornament and overall page design.
By the mid 17th century, the range of scripts seems to have gone down to essentially Dutch, French and Italian.
Now, as we shall see, the names of Dutch masters were well-known amongst 18th century English writing masters in England writing models.
From the start, it offered a wide array of scripts English, Italian and French,
which comes as no surprise since the first English copy book that you see here was produced in 15 70 by the Huguenot genre,
Bhushan, specialising in French and Italian styles, and John Beldon, who was presumably responsible for the local English Gothic types.
That diversity lasted throughout the 17th century based on much that was borrowed directly from international models.
That is what we find illustrated in this splendid broadsheet by John Smith,
dated 16 83 with a more or less complete set of what you could find in the works of English writing masters.
Including many that already are inspired by foreign scripts such as this one,
which is which has clearly been looking at French writing lost in the 18th century, began with all eyes on French power, wealth and culture.
It ended with the collapse of the monarchy and widespread hostility towards the Republic.
Together with the rise of Britain, British commerce and all things British.
The first Napoleonic empire established French power and French standards across much of Europe again.
But ending in disaster ultimately confirmed the rise of Britain to world dominance.
That general shift in the balance of nations is also reflected in the destinies of letter forms.
France, after 16:33, you might remember, had been given a fixed system of scripts, which from that moment.
Stifled all foreign influence in the national tradition.
One script was left in Austria, which you see here a bold and upright script with evident gothic roots.
The proportions of letters and O were a perfect square or circle in proportion, and a century later, life in Australia became known as longhorned.
The other was so, yes, this is the title page of a of the great book by Rebel Widow,
of which I'll be mentioning again later on the kitchen of last year and also naivety.
This is the alphabet, especially the the small letters at the top.
This is a full page of the same, with typical French striking flourishing,
which is done in large part with thick up strokes by turning your quill upside down practically,
which is something the English masters will imitate later. And the second script was the little Jane Butterfield, a stripped down,
streamlined take on italic cursive with generous proportions, as opposed to the highly compressed styles by then common in Italy.
So this is the alphabet again, with three sets of minuscule letters more discursive.
And this is the kind of Italian writing that was used more generally at the time, as illustrated by Bob Woodward himself.
Um, and so Italian battalion that had serifs simple service rather than loops or decorative ball terminals like those you see here.
This may have have been inspired in part. This new script by a plate entitled Little Bathtub,
published in six eight by Luca Matagal in Avignon, reminiscent I think of italic type of the period,
maybe the kind of italic type that was made by, um,
by or birth control and a spectacular exception in the midst of a superb collection of smaller and more cursive italic scripts like this.
Berth, the new final seven battle to two abroad NIB scripts, clean and energetic in line with the most classical tendencies of French taste and
most ornaments were kept either simple and spontaneous or rigorously symmetrical.
The foremost exponent of both scripts was Louis Babydoll, whose book We have just been looking at the actual creator of the new financier and the
author of the most massive writing book of the 17th century some 60 plates in Plunder.
His most successful student was Louis Sunu, 16, 30 to 60, 91,
Penman and engraver who produce not only dozens of writing books but also stunning books of ours.
Books of prayers, prayer books engraved throughout in the most formal Italian background.
And he also collaborated with Jean-Baptiste Ali as an engraver.
Jean-Baptiste Ali W 16:35, 288, in his great book La Decree 16 683.
A new genre of writing book. A masterpiece of pedagogy and methodical set of principles explained and illustrated in the plates,
rather than just a set of fancy models showing off the master's talent.
It held detailed instructions and illustrate. So this is not the right one.
Now we have detailed instructions and illustrations,
amongst other fine points on how you should slit your quills slightly off centre, which we see here,
so as to make better ascending hair lines or on adapting the correct pin holds to the hands of different students,
you know, short, stiff hands, long feeble hands, etc., which is the mark of a true teacher.
And they also emphasised the importance of freedom in writing, leading to the emergence of a more coercive style in the following century.
More about this later.
The book, as you can see, was a vertical folio format that was unusual at the time that remained standard in France for the next 150 years.
All later, 17th century French handwriting was based on those same two scripts.
In striking contrast to the great diversity found elsewhere, the French viewed the Finocchiaro honed as their quintessentially national script,
and it was long recommended as the foundation of any instruction in handwriting.
But Fred tracing began to spread abroad exclusively in the form of Italian Bataan,
which anyone could easily read anywhere amongst early adopters, we find Ambrose Pearling.
Which is what we were looking at. Yeah, master of a French school in Amsterdam around 16 18.
But notice there is a technical difference here.
Polling produced similar forms form similar to the French, battered with a different instrument pointed flexible quill.
And this is most apparent in the thin up strokes. If you look at oh, especially, you can see both sides are not the same thickness.
Or in the. Upward movement in well, the DEA's here, no, it's not look at the DS here.
Such was the situation when the English writing masters started to show serious
interest in what was going on in France and French standards and methods of penmanship.
Samuel Peeps, amongst examples of many other writing masters put together a fine collection of prints and manuscripts by Parisian masters.
He particularly insisted he needed a copy of the bogus degree, which he apparently couldn't find.
At least it's not in the collection. He even obtained a list of all the masters in Paris for the year for the 7500.
A useful document now, presumably straight from the corporation itself.
At the same time, the English seemed to have formed a canon of foreign Penman who deserve to be admired and studied.
The names most often cited in the 18th century are those of Van de Velde and
Pearling in the Netherlands matter who babydoll and secondarily so in France,
names that are not only mentioned in preliminary texts but also glorified as a
calligraphic pantheon in decorative prints with just the names and flourishing,
what exactly they admired is less clearly stated. The fame of Matagal in particular,
seems to have misled Stanley Morrison into tracing the origins of the round hand back to Matthaus famous plate we saw earlier and his
suggestion still carries some weight to date is echoed in you and Clayton's recent and delightful history of writing the golden thread.
And you and, on the other hand, tends to refute the received notion expressed amongst others by Robert Moore in 1736 that
quote the [INAUDIBLE] Italian hand was first introduced to England by the famous John as.
Again, this is a tricky question of styles and names,
as writing Master of the Hand and Pen published a dozen works from six eighty to seventy five and his first book.
Was this year the new mood secretary? Showing.
I'm sorry. Yes, showing quote the [INAUDIBLE] Italians commonly called the new Alamo drowned hands.
We already have the name round hand. At the same time, we have other names.
The term Alamo had been applied by Sano and by others before him, specifically to the new Italian battled created in 16:33.
And even a quick glance shows us that was precisely the script imitated by errors, including in the title page,
imitated and recommended by saying it had by then become quote universal being practised in most parts of the civilised world.
And his only intent was to save his countrymen the trouble of sending for such examples from
abroad as offers some of the most interesting and insightful prefaces of the whole profession,
whereas others prefer to keep to technicalities and or to hit out at their colleagues invariably vile and incompetent.
It is true earlier Masters Martin Billingsley in the early 70s entry or later the
prolific Edward Cocker had included simplified Italian scripts of various kinds,
along with more cursive styles largely borrowed from the Dutch and other sources.
But as changed the game by giving first place to the French standard,
though he also played with it in ways that would have seemed intolerable in France, especially by mixing of cursive strokes with set strokes.
Like some of the mixing we see up here, which there is a sense of variety,
a taste for variety in English handwriting that is very different from what the uniformity that was preferred in France.
A comparison with previous with the previous generation shows that you also innovated by gradually dropping a number of archaic devices on the page,
such as thick, solid rules between examples which had been in use for a century already around and in 15 70 or margins filled by dense,
geometrical knotting. It mutated from also from earlier models.
His own flourishing is is the high contrast modern French flourish is what he tends to prefer.
Often in the restrained style of Bob Dole, but occasionally indulging in large spirals,
the more extravagant or elaborate decoration after recent French masters and pen drawings in the Dutch style, mostly of fish.
In Sixteen Ninety One, as produced, he had published a broadsheet entitled Matter who had divorce matter already with a current location unknown.
Unfortunately, I'd love to see what that looks like,
showing quote the great curiosity of the Italian hand in various alphabets containing some 900 letters.
Whether or not Metro's Batard was included, the Italian hand is.
Which is what, as says is not the same as battered [INAUDIBLE] Italian in a mood.
It is the second style used by. As for contrast, thin, compressed and fluent, which we see here.
You see the contrast between the top.
Well, the main title putative penmanship and then first part above and in which, et cetera, at the bottom of the two completely different scripts.
One we have at the top and bottom is what what is called the Italian hand.
With tall loops, as you can see in ball terminals filled in by Wiskus Inc, et cetera.
Again, the style that was not unknown but now replaced all similar varieties.
No matter who was actually the one source for that style and not for the busted italic.
Um, the work of AS was seminal in other ways, namely in his focus on commercial business in Sixteen Eighty Eight.
He produced the trades men's copybook, the first such book devoted entirely to commercial writing.
Commercial abbreviations, commercial documents, etc. Um,
the models in it described as quote all the merchant like running mixed hands now in use consist almost entirely
of the more cursive form of Italian battered with only a residual sprinkling of the old English secretary.
Commercial writing, the training of clerks for business in large London schools was to become the defining speciality of English writing masters.
It explains their commitment to efficiency, speed and legibility over gratuitous brilliance in 60 90, as produced the penmanship daily practise,
which is what we were looking at earlier exercises in arithmetic entirely in his two favourite styles.
Here again, you could see the I'm afraid the reproduction is not very good.
It's one of many from ebooks or yes, but you can see there also the French buttered.
For the main text with a larger thought at the top and then the title is in the Italian hand.
I'm. In his later books, his tastes grew more refined or better, said closer to his French models,
though his flourishing would still have looked slightly over the top in Paris. He also looked to the Netherlands for ideas and decoration and layout.
His masterwork was the large oblong folio, probably an imitation of Bob Doll, the true touch of Penmanship 98, which is what we see here.
The first part consists entirely of Italian and [INAUDIBLE] Italian hands of French derivation.
The second part being essentially a gothic hands very much indebted to Van der Velden.
Together with what was left of English secretary, which by the time of as was going downhill, very fast.
Even here, the flourishing was largely French,
and last came the old fossilised fossilised legal hands caught chancery gothic text the old English script.
Lastly, as produced in elementary copybook, the Pauls School round hand in an unusually small and narrow format with single line models,
I'm not sure this was a complete innovation at the time. If someone knows of any earlier examples, I'd be interested.
But it also remained typical of English writing models throughout the 18th century and from the early 19th century was also imitated on the continent.
So practically much of what we we are going to find in 18th century English writing masters.
Most of that is already present in the work of heirs and disputing the importance of as.
In that respect, uh. I think is something we should be careful about people who in 17 30 said it as it
invented those kinds of new scripts probably knew what they were talking about.
And he had adapted the modern French standard to English Baroque tastes through decoration.
His colleague John Seddon 16:44 277 Massive Johnson's free riding school took
this to another level with the art of flourishing or striking as it was called,
and marginal pen drawings taking precedence here over text.
His obsession with flourishing might explain why he also preferred to use a sharp, flexible quill.
This also shows in the writing itself, I think, which is lighter than that of ours.
Not quite as full bodied, but airy and delicate.
And he too limited his Italian writing to the two French grown varieties, which shows the influence of as catching on.
I think immediately. The next generation started tweaking the structure by stripping it down further,
by giving it more a greater slope and by cutting the pen to a sharper point,
with results similar to that of Ambrose pearling in the distribution of thick and thin strokes.
They also banished pen drawings, considered henceforth a ridiculous amusement of the past.
This is one example by by John by Charles Snell, where you see writing that is very similar to that of ours, but again, lighter.
It's it's more geometric and rigorous than that of Saddam, but definitely lighter than that of ours.
Um, that generation comprised George Shelley writing Master Christ's Hospital, which trained hundreds of students every year,
John Clark, master of the hand and Pen, and Charles Snell, a very vocal critic of anyone but himself.
Publishing in the first two decades of the 18th century, they defined the English round hand copiously, insulting one another in the process,
and they increasingly focussed on brown hand first, the Italian hand second with a dwindling number of gothic scripts shown at the end of their books.
The demise of secretary and the abolition of legal hands, if I remember rightly in 1731,
was to gradually reduce the gothic element to formal black letter imitated from print.
They borrowed decorative ideas again from Dutch masters such as ample elliptical lines of great purity surrounding the text.
The most contentious couple, Snell and Clarke, argued particularly about geometry, correct proportions and slope.
This is one instance in Snell's standard rules that the whole idea of setting standard rules for a script in itself is something you hear.
Snell is showing his own example at the bottom on one page and making fun of the proportions advocated by Clarke in the top page.
Saying that with Clarke's calculation, the result would be ridiculous.
And all of this is so rigorous, probably because it wasn't really meant for writing with a pen,
but it was rather meant for other uses of those same scripts that were typical in England of
the work of stone cutters and painters for more formal writing on tombstones and whatever.
There was also a general tendency across Europe to emphasise the geometry of letter forms
as one way of securing a higher intellectual dignity for the writing master as such.
And that generation finally also invented a form of title page that would last into the 19th century,
containing only writing no pen drawings, no architecture,
no nothing harmoniously stacking all the main scripts with black letter often most
prominent and plenty of gothic flourishing in the form of swirling headlines.
This is an example. By John Bland 1730.
Much of what was produced in the 18th century, we owe to the burin of George Bickham, the engraver who himself became a great Penman.
And the most impressive panorama we have of English penmanship of the time is
the massive publication and 212 page 212 plates undertaken by Bickham himself.
That was supposed to be published in instalments over 52 weeks.
And so one year and actually went on from 17 33 to 17 41 with chaotic organisation.
It was the first time anyone had attempted to do any anything of the kind that hadn't been planned, as it should have.
Probably all the writing masters didn't hand in their pages as regularly as they were supposed to do.
What this publication shows with plates by very many writing most of the time is the great uniformity
that had already been attained and reduction of the number of scripts to a much more limited cannon.
The same can be said by looking at this plate, especially by comparison with the earlier played by John Smith and 16 83,
which is all alphabets in all the hands now practise in Great Britain.
You can see there are far fewer than there were in 16 83.
This plate here is seventeen. Fifty six, I believe.
Again, bye bye, Bickham. And so you have at the top, the two we're interested in at the moment,
round hand and running hand running hand being the cursed version of around town,
and then there's no one that's often mentioned and not here, which is the round text, which is the set larger version of round hand.
As a closer look,
the ultimate acknowledgement of how much English handwriting owed to the continent was an extraordinary book published in 1756 by Joseph Champion,
the parallel or comparative penmanship exemplified in for the greatest original foreign masters.
That is not true Bob Adore, John Grunsfeld and Ambrose Pearling with the same examples.
This is again the title with the same,
which you can read on the screen with the same examples and translations written in the present taste of England,
to which are added correct alphabets into several hands of Great Britain,
and an historical preface of the most eminent Penman, etc. at home and abroad.
So I won't dwell on the preface, which is a very interesting document in itself with all those names of Penman.
But as for the plates, the title says it all.
The book contained four exacting reproductions engraved after the four masters each followed by a copy in the corresponding English style.
So this is what we see in the book.
Bob Dole copied exactly from an original tape by Bob Dole, followed by the equivalent script in the English system being the round hand.
Essentially, the running hand. Then.
A translation of the same text. So in this case, you see,
we had the text in French in the same French text in the English style and then an English variation
on the same plate with the text translated and the layout also revised into a more modern style.
And he did the same with with the four other masters plus plus the alphabets he mentioned at the end.
This election tells us precisely what English masters by then owned to whom to mutter who.
Not the battered, but the delicate Italian hand,
which is what is illustrated in the book the Barbados Italian battered here in its most cursed form to run
the veiled the [INAUDIBLE] Gothic and propelling a large Italian hand equivalent to English round text.
And in the second half of the century, writing books were many still, but they tended to repeat the same canon over and over.
And even Ambrose Peel, who lovingly compiled the bibliography of English writing books in 1931,
starts to complain of their monotony as he goes into the second half of the 18th century.
One difference looking at levels of execution is between masters who gave the running hand the running hand proportions similar to the round hand,
thus adding uniformity, whereas others followed a style that is illustrated amongst others in the universal Penman with a shorter,
wider body and longer senders and dissenters, we'll see an example of that later on.
A few later, masters stand out in retrospect because in retrospect, we look for innovation.
But some were famous in their own time for the perfection of their work. Such was Thomas Tomkins, 1743 at 1816.
For 40 years, he was employed by the City of London for ceremonial calligraphy.
He was a friend of artists, had his portrait painted by Reynolds,
and spent most of his career hoping that in vain that he might join the Royal Academy or at least receive an invitation to the annual dinner,
which apparently didn't get either. Later, judgements on his work clearly illustrate changing opinions on round hand calligraphy.
The Dictionary of National Biography in 1899 said that for boldness of design,
inexhaustible variety and elegant freedom, he was justly considered to have attained the highest eminence in his art.
Whereas in 1931, Heald thought that praise sounded odd, adding viewed today, it does not strikers as being in any way remarkable.
Meaning mainly that Tomkins offered nothing new, except maybe remarkable lightness and delicacy of touch,
especially visible in his ornaments, which kept the swelling of lines to a minimum.
It is tempting to think that the renewed popularity of striking,
including pen drawings that had been eradicated in the early years of the round hand was a means of reaffirming that,
say, the creative value of penmanship within a standard that left almost no space for invention in letter forms.
One can hardly distinguish the work of Tompkins from those of some of his contemporaries, such as William Owens,
Edmund Butterworth or Richard Langford to us in retrospect, the main point about those names is their subsequent popularity on the continent.
Theirs were the first the first English writing books ever known to have been
exported and imitated across the channel and for writing other languages too.
So now back to context and to the circulation of forms.
The new British standards of writing had evolved over three or four decades and then been further honed
and polished based on models going back for the most part to the sixteen hundreds and sixteen thirties.
And in the meantime, French masters had not remained idle. They had created a new script for themselves and had established quite an influence abroad.
The early 18th century in the memory of later generations of Penman was the age of Rosenwald.
Louis Rossignol was a student of a student of John study.
And he carried further Ali's ideal of freedom by perfecting a new script,
a cursive hybrid of the final share of the Italian battlefield, which is what we see here.
The photograph is a bit dark.
It kept the slope of battered but the broken mediums of gothic assent, together with other fanciful post gothic, distinctly French letter forms.
Such as the essays you see on the end here, label issue, two different essays, which no one could read outside of France.
The the perfection, the light touch, the fire quote and tenderness of his hand in all three scripts.
Made also in your legend of handwriting for over a century, the semi gold of penmanship.
Those are expressions that we used at the time, the Rafale of the quill.
His style of striking to. Asymmetrically decreasing coils rather than knots redefined French ornamentation
when he died in 1739 at the age of 45 without having published a single plate.
Master's amateurs and collectors rushed to get hold of his original models.
We are told the English bought up a large proportion, which is curious since no direct influence of his style is to be found over here.
So if that is true, he was admired but not imitated. Print sellers immediately started selling well,
producing and selling copy books under his name based on any model of a more or less appropriate style.
Many of them not actually Bible signal and continue doing so to the end of the century.
It is impossible to overstate the influence of Washington on his generation and those that followed.
And yet lacunae had little part in the influence of powers over the continent as an
England international face of French handwriting was the battle between the embattled.
Germany is famous for its French gardens and palaces inspired by Versailles, and many German writing books offered plates in French.
Written in some imitation of battered, usually pretty crude in style,
similarly to most examples of Latin or Italian writing in those books, some books were even entirely about French handwriting.
Shortly after 17:00, we had this one LA decree, which is not too bad in style.
Published in Nuremberg. No date was on 17:00 to 1720.
I'm. The. So this is large degree and fiction.
The title is very French, too too soft to the actual forces Italian, but other forces here,
meaning the final shareholder home say in this case is not limited to Italian, but it actually has the arch.
The. The essentially national script, the homeland or financier.
A few other books, similar books appeared in the latter part of the century, not to mention bilingual or French books published in Alsace.
Of course, after the province was conquered by Louis, the 14th in 1797 most interesting case of the period,
I think the most interesting country to look at is Italy.
The production of fine copy books had totally collapsed there after 16:40 the minor aspect of a time of general decline after 60 years,
the first signs of a very modest revival started appearing in the North in Milan 17 05.
This novel Ebro this in Florida key to the Italian, are written by a priest, Giacomo Maria Barka, and engraved by W in in Paris.
The lawyer who is not especially known as a letter engraver and who did not do a very good job.
But it was engraved in Paris because probably in situ there was no one even capable of doing what the New York did for this book.
The modest book, but in a style that is essentially that of French battered,
modified by the use of more local forms of capitalism, more coercive, more current Italian style capitals.
And this was in print, at least through 1725. We look to Turin next made the capital of the new Kingdom of Sardinia in 1720.
What is a kingdom without copy books?
Just two years later, there appeared woefully liberal character diversities cryptographer Martha A. Siva Perfetto, etc. by Giuseppe Aurelio.
But what French name engraved by Cluedo Ghost Beret in Paris?
This was also modest in size, which was small figure but much better executed.
Beret was the leading letter engraver in Paris at the time, even producing his own copy books,
and this one owed a lot to him beyond the engraving, I think even cloning some of his own plates.
The the title page is very much in his style, and this plate is lifted directly from one of Betty's books.
The Nova Liberal went through multiple printings, at least up to the seventeen sixties and in part up to the 1780s,
the most intriguing Italian copybook of the time is this one,
a maelstrom in detail recuperated by the Rev. Francesco DeCaro, the splendid in planner's 50 centimetres.
Um. With 44 plates engraved in Paris again, as it says by batik,
this is universally considered the most splendid accomplishment of Italian calligraphy in the 18th century.
Except that no Italian hand seems to have had any part in it, and there is no other trace of DeCaro as a calligrapher.
We know he went to Paris to study mapmaking, but that was the closest he got to calligraphy.
On the other hand, the engraver had done other books for Pulseway Nicola BTG, a well-known Paris writing master,
and BTG himself in a short, handwritten note to himself of his life and works.
Use something of an egomaniac BTG, which is wonderful because he left.
It gives us plenty of written notes everywhere about himself and BTG in that note, spilt the beans.
He had done the book for the charity. He says, I did five books in my life, including one under the name DeCaro,
who was then in Paris studying mapmaking and could then go home with something to dedicate to his king.
There's a splendid portrait of the King. Well, it's been called calligraphic plate with a portrait of the king.
The just after the title page. Finally, yes, the style itself, you can see the ornaments at the top.
They're very much in the French style and most specifically in the style of Jean.
Finally, the French style made its way into the elementary school books produced in the
following decade as part of the instructional reform promoted by Francesco Slavitt.
This is a plate. So this is the title page and this is a plate from his widespread 1786 manual of handwriting.
Again, very crude engraving, but the basic model again is French French battered,
including you can see the upward swelling strokes in Philadelphia and so on.
And in the early 18th century, the works of Louis Sono mentioned earlier,
the foremost calligrapher and better engraver of his time seem to have attracted some international attention,
not so much his copy books as his four different books of ours engraved throughout, as I've said in imitation of small deluxe manuscript prayer books.
His Best-Selling novel Dejima Le Dauphine, first published in 685, which we see on the left here,
inspired Maria Youssef Clement's cow colour to publish a similar book,
Fisticuffs Zeeland Shuts the Treasure of the Christian Soul in Berlin 1729 engraved throughout in an airy German gothic [INAUDIBLE].
Also, a bestseller still considered one of the most splendid books produced in 18th century Rococo Germany.
You can see how close it is to to the model in layout.
News popular new vein of said, did you watch 688 were also imitated in 1732, this time including the script and decoration by a Portuguese nun.
That is Angelica da Silva in her Manuel Joe USO's now exceedingly rare, though, but there's two editions one copy of each edition for Christine.
In the 1760s, models of all three French scripts suddenly became available throughout Europe.
Charlotte Biswal, one of Europe's most successful students,
had been invited to contribute a section on handwriting for the liberty of Idaho and then on Bear in 16 pages and 16 plates.
It gave a clear, thorough and methodical introduction to French handwriting like no, unlike any other before or after.
It was engraved in 1760, published in 63 and travelled everywhere with the security.
The original edition later editions, pirate editions, adaptations, foreign translations took it everywhere.
It was also circulated separately and imitated to Polish versions and were also produced.
So a quick look at the of the plates you see.
The three different scripts here differ on each on the horn to first the battle the.
It could be five different levels. From the least coercive to the most passive.
And this, as I just said, was imitated. In this in this Polish edition, which in this case is the handwriting section alone, um,
published in Warsaw in 1781 under the title Stuka persona The Art of Writing with additional plates.
It has the French plates, plus Polish and German at the end. At that point, France began to feel the heat of English competition.
Notebooks can tell us how much English handwriting was going on on the continent before that,
that we need to investigate in archival sources, especially, I think, in commercial archives and commercial correspondence with Britain.
British tradesmen were becoming established at strategic points along the coastline of all European seas,
importing and exporting goods from Hamburg to Dunkirk, Bordeaux and Leghorn.
They had English clerks and local clerks writing for them, many presumably bilingual.
The only evidence I have looked at yet is the splendid commercial archive of the Hennessy brandy in cognac.
Just because I've been teaching them English commercial pornography recently and this is one of the pages of their copy books,
no letter books in the hand of Richard Hennessy himself,
the founder who was an Irishman and whose hand in style is not quite as carefully done as what we've seen in the writing masters,
but taking letter by letter and in detail. It's very close to the kind of running hand we find in the universal Penman and elsewhere,
the kind of running hand that seems to have been perfected essentially by Joseph Champion and John Bland.
He also employed. So yes, this is an example of that running hand precisely small bodies, longer Sanders loops, etc. And in the same books,
we also find more hybrid styles, some clearly by French scribes trying to adapt while writing in English.
You can see this one's trying to be as.
Stylistically neutral is possible, but it still has a number of typical French letters, like some of the some of the initials here.
This kind of. I will see the see the mass that will drop that,
and what I don't know is when continental businessmen began to use the round
hand not only when doing business with Britain or when writing in English,
but also in their own papers and languages, making it to all effects on international medium of communication,
equal to italic scripts in the Renaissance. What I can say is that it first shows up in copy books in the 1780s.
First, maybe, unsurprisingly, in Portugal. Portuguese copy books, I mean, unsurprisingly, because of the intense trade.
Routes leading from Britain to Portugal and back, will the port be shipped over to England and.
Yes, this this is the first, uh, the first book we can mention, Portuguese copy books were not even a handful before that,
but extremely few Portuguese copy books since the late 16th century, not even a handful and nothing of note had appeared since 1722.
Um, the next title after 1722 was this one, the nova to describe it by Antonio Jassem to.
There are a magnificent oblong folio published, it seems in 1794,
but long in the making since the title plate is dated 1783 and it is in a remarkably English style but revised by a Portuguese calligrapher.
The writing is English round hand, only very tall and compressed, uh, clearly under the influence of Iberian bystander.
Which was like that with richly decorated initials of a similar taste.
The marginal flourishing in pen drawings also reminiscent of the of earlier styles,
but did not detain us here in a country with extremely low levels of literacy like Portugal,
one would like to know how many copies it sold, probably far fewer than a more elementary book that appeared just after that in 1784.
Groups that also seems to have disappeared, never mind the Norway scholar.
The Menino's by Manuel Diaz de Sousa, 1784, which is very elementary book for children with only five plates on handwriting,
and the samples are clearly a crude rendering of round hand again or rather around the large round text.
In 18th century, Italian, Spanish sorry, writing books were relatively few and far between, but favoured a more encyclopaedic outlook.
Some of those massive tomes with hundreds of pages on the history and theory of writing, some of them really interesting,
showed a remarkable awareness of what was going on all over Europe,
even offering reproductions of plates from numerous foreign masters of previous centuries.
You can find much of all about the doll. Only the Italian masters and so on.
In 1789, the very remarkable two volume reflections delivered the data art described by Domingo Maria,
which would be Domenico Maria said with a priest of Italian Origin has plates a full dozen and
explanations on the English school one plate here with a number of of English English masters.
Um, and laudatory comments on AS Snell, Shelley and others.
But French masses still take precedence in the book French First and English Next.
At that point in time, only France and Germany produced a constant outpour of books in that in that century in Germany,
based on the the standard bibliography by Van Aduda 1958,
more than one in three copy books in the eighteenth century contain some French examples sometimes mentioned in the title itself,
including six books entirely in French.
The first English examples that appear in German books are in Johann Bernard Fisher Leopold coach until the Finnish and Spartan Bavaria 1781,
where we can see that round hand goes under the label Latin ish Latin here, meaning anything that's not Germanic.
Which is why these titles are not always very explicit.
As soon as 1785, two English copy books were reproduced call them facsimiles or pirate engravings in Germany, one by Butterworth in Berlin.
The only known copy is now lost or destroyed in the war and one by Langford at Orks Bagh, followed by another in 1799.
Nuremberg. Duncan Smith, the Academical instructor and a sprinkling of other English plates and a handful of other books in Germany.
The English style was only the latest addition to a set of foreign scripts.
In France, the situation was very different because the the English UH models were coming in and competing directly with the national tradition,
which made the matter bitterly contentious. It was the the English round hand was clearly known to some extent, at least to professionals,
presumably from imported books, before they began offering that script to the public themselves.
But still, how much they knew is unclear.
This is the earliest example I know of a French imitation of an English round hand by a French writing master again, Nicole Abhijeet.
And one must confess it's really very bad.
The main difficulty here being that he's writing with a French pen, he's writing with a broad quill, which doesn't work for an English script.
And this is 1785. The main thing he's imitating reduce letter forms to some extent, and then the slope with is greater than in French.
French right hand in 1789, Jean Jean-Claude Sattu Golf admits he is entirely about French scripts,
but the caption under his portrait ironically is essentially an English running hand, meaning at least the engraver knew how to do that.
It would be interesting to check captions of prints in general,
but you find lots of engraved calligraphy and see when that switch is due to the English round hand revolution and empire
to cut a very long story short redefined forms of political authority and concepts of national identity in France,
turning loyalty to the monarch into patriotism.
And in all those years, there was this outpour of copy books that turned into a hailstorm during that period.
In all, with essentially a handful of masters producing dozens of titles, each Gilmore for everything, Gilmore for 27 books and counting,
still finding more Charlotte ICIA 30, Jean-Claude Santamaria, 26, and Jean-Louis Emmanuel,
the taut 23, Alexander Bourgeois, 48, and still counting out of some 150 titles.
One in three mentions long plays either alone or alongside French scripts in the title, and many more contained single examples.
The trend grew constantly, despite strong resistance from many quarters in defence of the tradition of Oceanian
against the barbaric new fashion as very violent expressions in those discussions.
One old master in 1883 called it in deep aversion. The English style, especially Licia, declared war on long plays,
seeking to invent new and faster varieties of the Kool-Aid that could compete in efficiency without sacrificing French elegance,
garnering support from public institutions. In 18:00, he published his parallel the most hostile, disadvantageous, dictatorial Joseph,
hostage of anglais and other titles, but most of his colleagues gladly yielded to public demand.
Such as. You need to look at your homeless landed or imperial looking title page, one means of saving face,
and I revert to what I was saying at the beginning of this lecture was just what labels are getting round hand rather than long lays.
Thus became known in some quarters as legacy of the term still used by many in later decades and also American, which was way of annoying the English.
Maybe any survey of European calligraphy in the 1790s?
Oh yeah, sorry. A couple of books published in France again. Yes.
So we've seen that one bite you in the tooth, and this one is published by French, uh, engraver d'Avignon.
After models by which crofter? A London master.
Any survey I was saying of European calligraphy in the 1790s needs to mention Sweden, which had not done much to then in that java.
The fascinating instance of. Nation building through rational handwriting in 1794, Carl Beckman,
director of Land Surveying for Sweden, produces Magnificent Green Journal to create constant.
In the preface of the The Basics of the art of writing foundations of the art of writing in the preface,
he deplores the lack of a uniform system of cursive scripts and offers to create one for the nation.
The system he came up with consists of four scripts labelled neutrally cursive one, cursive two, cursive three and cursive four.
Numbers one and three, in fact, are butter and Kool-Aid, which he took directly from basil.
Number two is round hand. Number four is German co-head.
They're all from other places, but. Being. Made into the national scripts of Sweden,
the layout of the place itself is taken directly from the place and the security by by passing by 18:00 round hand was gaining ground everywhere.
Based on the works of Tompkins and his contemporaries,
some of which were brilliantly copied by local calligraphers and engravers in France, Germany and Italy.
Here is a book. No. Type one such book was recently sold by a very knowledgeable bookseller as the
French printing from original English English plates imported into France.
In fact. It's a French copy done by a French engraver, but that is an exact facsimile.
There's only a very small signature by the by the engraver in the corner of the title page that tells you it's not the same book.
In Italy, Napoleonic institutions accelerated the spread of French models, including Le Monde,
not only battered but in conjunction with round hand rather than crudely as the cursive script coup de was still considered difficult to export.
Giuseppe Civil Servant in Turin, writing Master to the pages of the Imperial Highnesses, printed several successful copy books along those lines.
So did Gaetano, JRA and Sons in Florence. In Germany at the time, the most telling case is that of Johann Heinrich's 1781 to 1861,
the author very many fine writing books over four decades, especially for business trading.
His original range of scripts around eight in 10 covered German, French and English, and to a lesser extent, Dutch and Italian.
And you can see the style,
the very neoclassical style applied here to this title page and a very elaborate and again very lightweight variety of writing,
which is a strange mix of of styles with essentially English round hand.
It's where it says Heinrichs. And then the next line is French horns sloping backwards, done with a pointed quill.
And his his later work into the 1850s gradually focussed more and more on exclusively German and English dropping and the others,
which I think is revealing. So we see.
Yes, this plate by bye, Heinrich's again, is it you honed and again, the interesting thing here is to see that it's done with the wrong quill.
It's done with an English type quill applied to an essentially broad nib script.
The monotony of the round hand,
he enlivened in some spectacularly graphic plates in the German and say is a terrible taste in his Zen Bullish calligraphy show constable letter.
This is one of the most amazing plates of English round Honda I've ever seen.
The next step. In England than abroad, and the last word for quite some time after that was technical.
First, the adoption of steel nibs with millions of nibs exported from Birmingham,
which made the pointed pen ubiquitous and point to was the invention by Joseph Carstairs of the new system of teaching the art of Writing,
which is the title of his book 1814, which advocated bold and free writing.
Using shoulder and elbow movements with no contribution from the wrist or fingers to the extend,
the fingers of beginners should actually be tied up in strings, a method Jean-Baptiste, and they would no doubt have found very distasteful.
The Carstairs method spread like wildfire in the bay in the 1820s through multiple editions,
translations, updates, limitations across Europe and North and South America.
In France, eight different versions of his books of his book were published in 1828 in 1829 alone.
Under such convoluted titles as that, Poland, Highclere You of Hall Sulu known the method américain.
Yeah. Voltaire nobility. Uh, and in the United States, it started new stylistic trends that moved further away from British standards that had been.
What the Americans were using up to then. But that is another story.
Thank you.