Comment on insert mental health condition here
greedytacothief@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week agoAs a person who’s special interest is calligraphy, what do you mean by cursive? I had always thought that scripts were on a spectrum between gothic and cursive, with more strokes per letter or less strokes respectively. Though I mostly practice ornamental penmanship (fancy spencerian), so I don’t know much about the history of hands in Europe.
Juice@midwest.social 1 week ago
I guess I’m drawing a line between the late medieval period when there was accelerated social development of the EU, but not enough scribes and scholars, and so their work suddenly became very sought after in a new world made of contracts and written agreements. So I’m probably talking about arguably two different things. First when writing in a very formal manner was a literal sign of intelligence, because that kind of intellectual work became a necessary component of late pre-modern statecraft, and hence highly valued by the ruling classes of the time and place. The second connection is to cursive, which is a formalized writing that had real legal and business value just a few generations ago.
So I’m sure I am butchering the history of any actual scripts that were mentioned in this effort post. But as someone who has a pretty lively fascination with handwriting, font and text in general, I’d love any questions, clarifications, resources, criticisms and reprimands that are due!
greedytacothief@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
Well I don’t think the vocabulary is particularly important here, since they likely didn’t use the words in the same way we do. Like some scripts like batard or English secretary hand were evolutions of the formal script that reduced pen strokes to be faster to write making them more cursive.
But I’m curious about the history of connected letter scripts like Italian round hand. But most of the books I’ve read about handwriting have been in the American tradition, and it helps they are easy to find on the Internet. Some cursory reading on the subject seems to point to it coming from Italy in the form of old Roman cursive. To my eyes old Roman cursive seems related but is too different for me to call a flowing connected letter script. This isn’t surprising though since it was used to write on wax tablets.
It seems like something we would recognize in the modern world as a connected letter cursive originated in the late 15th century Italy out of italic script. But I don’t speak Italian or Latin so I don’t know how to find any primary sources on this.
Juice@midwest.social 1 week ago
Italy is a fascinating region to study language, it was broken up into city states well into the 1800s, with some of those city states serving as the center of culture and intellectualism for all of Europe, at various times. So there was like these very advanced areas of Italy, and these very backwards parts, and the 1800s was all about getting people all speaking the same language, the Florentine dialect.
I bet if someone took on such a study it would be a very uninteresting read. Also Italians are friendly and speak good English I bet you could connect with someone who could help explore the topic more!