7. INFORMAL AND SCHOLARLY HANDS OF THE LATE ELEVENTH AND OF THE TWELFH CENTURY

As we have already seen, the dominant script of the "golden age" of Byzantium, the Perlschrift, continued in use as a calligraphic bookhand well into the twelfth century. It was in fact never "replaced" by a successor script; instead, it underwent an evolution (sometimes referred to in terms of "decadence" or "dissolution") involving the incorporation of cursive elements and leading eventually to the rather baroque styles which will be found in many fourteenth-century bookhands. The natural view that this was a linear development, with greater "cursivity" being a sure sign of late date, was challenged in an important paper published by Nigel Wilson in the proceedings the 1974 Paris conference (pp. 221-239), who showed that the cursive elements found in bookhands as early as the eleventh and twelfth centuries are often found in copies made by scholars for private use rather than for the book trade, and that they moreover corresponded closely to developments in dated documentary and chancery scripts of the same period, suggesting on the one hand that the origins of this phenomenon are to be sought in a blurring of the distinction between professional calligraphers and bureaucratic scribes (due perhaps, as suggested by G. Cavallo [in his contribution to the 1998 Cremona conference proceedings, pp. 219-238:236], to what appears to have been a massive increase in book production at this time, resulting in a hypothetical shortage of professional scribes); and on the other that a number of manuscripts which had previously been dated to the thirteenth or even fourteenth centuries were in fact examples of "scholarly hands" from the twelfth or even eleventh centuries (as indeed explicitly indicated in a number of subscriptions whose veracity which had previously been doubted due to the apparent lateness of the scripts in the relevant manuscripts).

The upshot is that, in the second half of the eleventh century and throughout the twelfth, we begin to see bookhands incorporating to a greater or lesser degree a rather bewildering variety of cursive elements and of stylistic quirks which originated in documentary and chancery scripts. The main features which are typically found in these hands, apart from a general ("cursive") tendency to join letters in ways which are not necessarily predictable, were listed already by Wilson (p. 222), namely:

Not all characteristics are represented in all exemplars, and they may appear with more or less prominence. Building on Wilson's observations, Lidia Perria and Paul Canart attempted a typological classification of these hands in a paper published in the proceedings of 1983 Paleography conference in Berlin-Wolfenbüttel (vol. 1, pp. 67-118 & vol. 2, pp. 51-68; repr. in Canart, Études…, pp. 933-1000). There is a wide variety in these scripts, with many sub-categories comprising only a few extant witnesses, so it is not possible to study them all here. A few representative samples are shown below:

For practice reading and transcribing these scripts, please see Vat. gr. 65, Vat. gr. 504, and Vat. gr. 586.

(On to Thirteenth-Century Hands)