Well, you asked for it, so here it is: a brief history of the mighty ampersand! #BreakfastPaleography
The character we know as the ampersand [&] is used in nearly every Latinate language as a stand-in for the word [and]. But it didn’t start life as an abbreviation. It is actually a ligature, a Latin combination of two letters: [e] and [t], or [et], which in English means [and].
Now that you know that much, you can sort of tell that early ampersands are a capital [E] connected to a [t], right? But then the basic form gets stretched and twisted and transformed until it doesn’t really look like e+t anymore.
As with most lower-case Latinate letters, we first meet the [et] ligature in New Roman Cursive, developed in the 3rd century C.E.
But it isn’t alone; there are several other [e] ligatures as well. The way [e] is written, the final horizontal stroke lends itself to ligation with [c], [d], [g], [m], [n], [r], [s], [t] and [x].
These [e] ligatures make their way into the crazypants pre-Caroline scripts in various ways:
In 9th-c. Caroline, however, [e] is only ligated with [t]. Why? I don’t know! Maybe because it’s the only [e] ligature that is also a word? Suddenly, [et] becomes [&] pretty consistently, whether as the whole word or in the bigraph within a word.
BUT [e] continues to be found in ligature with other letters in insular manuscripts as late as the 11th century! Sometimes it still looks like e+t, but sometimes it just doesn’t.
As we move into the proto-Gothic, or Romanesque, period (11th-12th c.), we start to see the Tironian form of [et] (looks like [7]) used as well. [&] is a ligature; [7] is an abbreviation. Gottschalk of Lambach uses both:
By the time Gothic quadrata and other Gothic scripts are fully developed in the 13th c., [&] is generally replaced by [7] to indicate [et]. Why? I don’t know! N.b. In northern Europe, [7] has a crossbar (l). In Italy, it doesn’t (r).
But when those Humanists like Petrarch and Boccaccio revive Caroline models in the 14th century, they also bring back the mighty ampersand, which no longer looks anything like an [e] joined to a [t]. As with [g], the Humanistic form look an awful lot like the [&] Twitter uses!
And what about the English word “ampersand”? First documented in 1797, it is a contraction of the phrase “and per se and” (“’&’ by itself is ‘and’”).
French “esperluette” may have a similar origin, “et per lui et”. The German term, in typical straightforward German fashion, is simply “Et-Zeichen” (“et symbol”). The end!
Epilogue: Modern typography (and @JonathanHsy) LOVES a good [&]. Here are some that were collected by the great paleographer B. L. Ullman.
I found these in his archive, which is in the @medievalacademy office. Ullman was my Doktor-Urgroßvater (my PhD advisor’s advisor’s advisor), so a love of ampersands must run in the family!
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
I know we're all obsessed with the stream of discoveries about #receptiogate, the revolving-door website updates, & Rossi's doubling-down claims of innocence that are easily disproven, but I also want to talk about her #fragmentoogy work, which is troubling in several respects...
As many of you know, I have been working closely with @FragmentariumMS and many other scholars for decades to develop best-practices for cataloguing, data-modeling, and digital reconstructions of dismembered manuscripts, i.e. #fragmentology
To her credit, Rossi is doing that too, working to recontruct recently-dismembered Books of Hours, transcribing them to allow for deep analysis of the recovered liturgy. This is a very worthy goal, & the transcriptions, while not always correct, are useful. So that’s great! But…
One of the astonishing parts about this update is that Rossi admits to "colourising" b/w photos! Plaigerism aside, & whether the "colourising" really happened in this case or not, the idea of taking a b/w photo and quietly colorizing it is incredibly misleading!
Tacitly editing images of fragments seems to be her MO: adding borders where there are none, cropping for consistency of size, inserting a mis=matched binding, adding fake flyleaves, colorizing b/w images. How can readers trust such a deceptive author?
I've never encountered anything quite like it in the digital realm. It is analogous to the tacit "restoration" work 19th-century forgers practised on illuminated mss, like the one I describe here (a forgery Peter identified!): manuscriptroadtrip.wordpress.com/2019/08/28/man…
Look, people, it's not that hard. The rules of #Fragmentology are simple and finite. 1) If you are going to piece a dismembered manuscript back together online, do it with intellectual honesty.
2) If there's are missing leaves, show us where it is by indicating lacunae, as in this screenshot of my own work on the Beauvais Missal:
3) If there's no binding, don't photoshop the reconstruction into one. Digital reconstructions aren't about "fixing" physical imperfections by adding elements to make it look pretty.
Spending the afternoon @BeineckeLibrary photographing Wilfrid #Voynich 's scrapbook of press clippings heralding the "news" of the manuscript's decoding and attribution to Roger Bacon, and found this marvelous bit of editorial snark from the Providence Tribune, April 22, 1921:
Am now looking for an excuse to use the expression "I don't give two whoops in a rain barrel!"
Here's another good one, from the New York Evening Post, May 3, 1921. Apparently it is bad form to snort with laughter in the Beinecke Library reading room.
OK, people, you worked hard to get me to 10K followers, so here is your reward! An epic 62-Tweet thread about the #Voynich manuscript coming your way, starting NOW!
1. First things first. The #Voynich manuscript (VMS from now on) is a real object. Please always keep that in mind! It is a medieval manuscript (more on that in a minute) that belongs to the @BeineckeLibrary at Yale University, where it has been MS 408 since it was given in 1969.
2. I have seen it on multiple occasions and can confirm this. It is not imaginary. It is not fake. It is not a gift from aliens. But what IS it?
Remember a few weeks ago when I gave a lecture @imc_leeds about my reconstruction of the Beauvais Missal & announced that leaf no. 113 had landed in my inbox the day before? Now that I’m caught up on other things, I can work on placing it in the reconstruction. Here’s how…
Step 1: identify recto & verso. Generally a straightforward task…look for the binding holes (i.e. the gutter), which, in a manuscript that reads left -> right will be on the left of the recto side. In this case, the leaf is heavily trimmed on all sides, so no binding holes!
No binding holes, no problem. Just look at the text, and figure out which side continues the text from the other. In this case, though, the leaf is framed and only one side is visible! How to tell recto from verso, then? Is it impossible? Certainly not!