The large initials were typically illuminated masterpieces of the kind that I can't recreate. The two line initial was typical for section starts, chapter start would have three or four lines, book start could be very large. The initial is embedded in the text block. Red was the most common color, but blue, gold, or green were also used. * The text starts with a Lombardic initial that is in a different color. The last line is also justified if at all possible, occasionally exrta punctuation symbols or ornaments were added to fill the space. The rag was much smaller than what is nowadays considered appropriate. * Printed books were completely justified, handwritten would have a slightly ragged right edge where the lines differed in length by a few letters. Textus quadratus was usually written in two columns, but if the paper or parchament was too small for that, only one column was used, and that might have been a wider one. * The columns are quite narrow and justified. Here's the printers' standard sample text (Cicero's In Catalinam) set in Missaali in a medieval style: The closest modern fonts are Old English fonts that trace their origins to Flemish textura. The textura of Missaali is based on Missale Aboense that Bartholomew Ghotan printed in 1488. ![]() (His first work, Donatus's Latin grammar used a bastarda font because university textbooks were written with that script). When Gutenberg printed his Bibles, he based the typeface on textus quadratus. This form was used in Northern Europe for the most valuable religious manuscripts: manuals, psalters, graduales, Bibles, and missals. It is a textura font, meaning that the typeface is based on late medieval textus quadratus form of the textualis formata script. My initial posts all use Missaali as the font even though it's used in contexts where textura would not have been appropriate. People are welcome to submit good medieval fonts here, especially if someone knows good Carolingian miniscule or Italian humanist cursive fonts (both of which are legible nowadays). Both a charter and a psalter would have elaborate calligraphy, but the script would be different. These conventions changed over the years, but a contract between two merchants was in a different hand from a royal charter that in turn did not use the same hand as a psalter. There were strong conventions of what kind of script should be used for a particular kind of text. ![]() The only exception are some high-level chancellary hands that were used by the administrators of major kings and emperors (and some of them are classified as book scripts). As a general rule of thumb, most documentary scripts are unusable for propmaking. A documentary script was in a way a simplified form of a book script, and then the next generation of the book script incorporated some features of the documentary script in a more formal fashion. The dividing line between them is fuzzy, but the rough idea is that book scripts were more formal and took more effort to write while documentary scripts used conventions that made writing faster. The documentary scripts were used in the everyday life for writing letters, inventories, contracts, tax records, and stuff like that while the book scripts were for literary manuscripts. They are traditionally divided into two main (but fuzzy) categories: book and documentary scripts. ![]() ![]() A huge number of different scripts were used in Europe over the thousand years that the middle ages lasted. Missaali is a late-medieval textura font that I've been working on for quite a few years now.īut first some general notes about medieval writing. The immediate reason for me starting this thread now is that last week I finally made the last adjustements to Missaali and released it to the wild. This is intended to be a thread for creating medieval-looking documents.
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