Copyists

Script for video https://youtu.be/nEoX5b7XvaE. Black inks' origins go back to India, fourth millennium BC. These primitive inks' main component was soot or smoke black, mixed with some agglutinating substance. This black ink is chemically very stable, but is easily washed off from parchment. Therefore, Medieval writers and copyists preferred another sort of black ink, known as metallo-acid ink or gallnuts ink. Metallo-acid ink works well on parchment, but its acidity can damage parchment. In fact, much European written heritage is endangered because of the metallo-acid inks' damaging many manuscripts.

Script for videos  https://youtu.be/JjUfPI8NEWc and https://youtu.be/RNU7W5afjvs
In practice, almost all manuscripts have at least one extra colour, even if just for the titles, which were most often written in red. In this video, we shall deal with colour inks. We shall see what sources we have to understand them, what components were used to achieve the different colours, and how coloured inks and paints were made.

Once all the page layout decisions had been made and the quires were ruled according to the purported design, the copyist could finally proceed to text transcription. Transcription, the copying of an existing text on a new material support, presupposes the existence of a model or antigraph, but also the existence of a copyist or transcriber in constant dialogue with his model, because the primary objective was transcribing the text from the antigraph with the highest degree of fidelity, and ideally to produce an identical copy. However, the new container of that old lexical sequence is often very different from the original one and the copyist is continuously compelled to make small decisions in order to adapt the text of his model to his new container.

Both before and after Gutenberg, the history of artistic, social, and political events has often been recorded in handwritten documents: historical chronicles, literary texts, musical scores, religious and philosophical treatises, ambassadorial and military reports, and the correspondence of authors, scientists, and political figures with the world around them. Literary scholars, historians, archaeologists, and others spend endless hours locating, deciphering, and evaluating these manuscripts. While access to these manuscripts was once difficult, digital technology is making increasing numbers of such documents available; but it has yet to make them easy to read and to evaluate for all but a tiny minority of specialists.The Manos Teatrales project, directed by the authors of this note, employs cyber-paleography techniques to open up and analyze the surviving wealth of manuscripts from Spanish Golden Age theater and related archival records that link that theater to the surrounding society. The procedures we use and describe below could be extended to other manuscript collections. The results of our research are constructed as a live, layered virtual world on the Web, centered on a searchable database, and this information is accessible to librarians, scholars, students, and interested individuals anywhere at www.manosteatrales.org. Our processes have been developed with support from a Duke University Provost's Common Fund grant, from National Endowment for the Humanities and American Council of Learned Societies digital initiative grants (2009-2010), and from further work on automatic writer identification with researchers at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid (2011-2013).Theater in Golden Age Spain, as in Elizabethan England and classical Greece, flourished as a central cultural institution. From the late sixteenth through early eighteenth centuries, drama was the most popular form of entertainment throughout the Spanish empire. Fast-moving three-act dramas were performed in public theaters, on palace stages, and even aboard ships to America; and autos sacramentales-allegorical religious drama-was performed on carts in town and city streets. Great playwrights-Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and Calderon de la Barca-and dozens of other writers penned thousands of dramas to meet the insatiable demand. In contrast to the case of England, however, a treasure trove that awaits students of Golden Age Spanish plays is the existence of hundreds of autographed, partially autograph and unsigned manuscripts of the plays. Many of the manuscripts left by the great dramatists have served as copy-texts for good modern editions, but relatively little has been done with the hundreds of unsigned manuscripts that survived in collections in Spain, other European countries, and America. In the Biblioteca Nacional Espanola (BNE) and the Theater Institute of Barcelona alone, they number well over fifteen hundred. Identifying their copyists yields information valuable not only for the evaluation of the manuscripts in question but also for understanding the organization and operation of the theatrical working community. These manuscripts show that some copyists worked closely with dramatists, making clean copies of their drafts, while other manuscripts reflect the work of a theater company owner who modified the text to suit his company's capabilities and his sense of audience preferences. Others made copies for specific actors, or for sale, and a few, anticipating today's movie pirates who use hand-held cameras, made their copies from memory after seeing a performance.Significant progress in the field of handwriting recognition has enabled practical applications in constrained modern domains, such as the recognition of postal codes. Although the challenges posed by writer identification in old manuscripts are greater than those that pertain to modern forensic uses, the goal is the same. Manos Teatrales originated in Margaret Greer's evaluation of a manuscript of Pedro Calderon de la Barca's court spectacle drama La estatua de Prometeo that she found in the Biblioteca Historica Municipal of Madrid in 1980 and edited. …

Script for video: https://youtu.be/NxMj7V_mqPQ
Once pricking was ready, ruling was the last operation that was left for the copyist before he could start writing. And ruling is simply the system of horizontal and vertical lines that limit the areas of the leaf that are destined to receive writing, at the same time that they provide the copyist with a sort of guide to align his writing.
Apparently ruling was not practiced on papyrus, where the horizontal fibres of the material already provided a clear enough guide for writing.
In this video we shall see, in relation to ruling:
• The different types of lines
• The resulting patterns formed by those lines
• The techniques employed to draw the lines
• The number of leaves that could be ruled in one single operation.
• And last but not least we shall briefly dwell on the way copyists utilized their ruling.

Emma Conant Church (1831–1893) was an American artist who had a successful career painting both original works of art and Old Master copies in the United States and Europe. She became part of the sizable foreign artist communities in Paris and Rome, where American artists, and particularly female artists, attracted much attention. In the era before originals and photographs were widely available and affordable, women like Church enjoyed great success – and an emancipated lifestyle – by catering their artistic production to the needs of travelers who sought out souvenirs of their time abroad.