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Lisa Fagin Davis Profile picture
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Mar 7 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Today is the feast day of St. Thomas Aquinas, who is absolutely definitely and for real the patron saint of illegible handwriting. Here's his script in Vatican Library, Vat. Lat. 9850, written 1260-1265. Image
digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.l…
A note in this manuscript added by Aquinas' secretary Reginald of Piperno basically says that you could read this text too, if only you could find someone who could make sense out of Thomas' handwriting! Image
His handwriting is literally known as "littera inintelligibilis"!

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More from @lisafdavis

Lisa Fagin Davis Profile picture
Mar 16
Check it out, folks, VCEditor now lets me show reconstructed formerly-conjoint bifolia of the fragmentary Beauvais Missal! SO COOL!
For example, here's a quire from August of the Sanctorale section. I've found 5 of the original 8 leaves of the quire, including two formerly-conjoint bifolia (in bright green): Image
Using the new feature, I can actually see the reconstructed outer bifolium of the quire! Here's the outer side, showing the catchwords on the final verso (left) and the conjoint first recto (right): Image
Read 8 tweets
Lisa Fagin Davis Profile picture
Jan 30
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.
Read 15 tweets
Lisa Fagin Davis Profile picture
Jan 25
OK, folks, brace yourselves because here comes the ultimate #BreakfastPaleography thread, in which I will follow the development of the wonderful, magical, mysterious and apparently very flexible letter [g] over the course of more than 2,000 years! Image
We’ll start in Rome, then jump up to the British Isles before heading back to the Continent. Buckle up, ‘cause here we go!
First up, majuscule [G]. This is the boring part of the story. Ancient Latin epigraphic and numismatic inscriptions form capital [G] in just about the same way we still do. Here’s one from 1st-c. Pompei. There, that was easy! db.edcs.eu/epigr/bilder.p… Image
Read 13 tweets
Lisa Fagin Davis Profile picture
Dec 22, 2021
So I thought about going to a museum in Boston today before Omicron shuts them all down but it's damp and foggy and cold and so I think I'll spend the day thinking about interesting paleographical features of the #Voynich manuscript instead. Here comes a Voynich paleography 🧵 ImageImage
Among the most unusual symbols in the manuscript are these, known to Voynichologists as “gallows.” There are four, classified by the number of legs and the number of loops. For convenience, we call them (l-r, t-b) f, p, k, t. Image
Gallows behave in interesting and not-yet-understood ways. They appear to be able to be ligated, like these specimens: Image
Read 8 tweets
Lisa Fagin Davis Profile picture
Sep 2, 2021
That's all, folks. Here comes a thread on the Vinland Map, one of the OTHER controversial objects at the Beinecke (and here you thought it was all about the #Voynich)...
The story of the map's time in New Haven is fascinating. In the 1960s, the Italian-American community was furious that the map, when thought to be authentic, "proved" that other explorers from Europe had crossed the Atlantic before Columbus (gasp!) (nvm that we knew that already)
Here are some images of political cartoons and letters that Yale received in the '60s from angry alums and members of the Italian-American community:
Read 12 tweets
Lisa Fagin Davis Profile picture
Dec 6, 2020
In honor of the Feastday of St. Nicholas, let’s take a close look at some scenes from his life as illustrated by Gottschalk of Lambach in the late 12th c., @StaBi_Berlin Theol. Lat. q.140: digital.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/werkansicht?PP…
This manuscript is a collection of Saint’s Lives and begins (f. 2r) with a visual table of contents: Gottschalk presenting his finished book to the Virgin and Child, with saints around the border. St. Nicholas is in the center right, as Bishop of Myra.
On the verso are four scenes from the Life of St. Nicholas, with original verses as rubrication around the edges.
Read 8 tweets

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