Early Career Researcher Double bill

Francesca Pontini: Digraphism in George Buchanan’s letters and marginalia

The paper proposed will investigate the writing practices of the poet George Buchanan (1506-1582), through some of his letters and marginalia, and how such practices are connected to the changing graphic expressions in early modern Europe. The paper will discuss how, in early modern Scotland and England, both the italic and secretary hands were used by different writers to satisfy different writing needs. Specifically, the italic hand was recognised as a hand for formal and international communication, while the secretary hand had a local circulation, not aimed to international readers. The presentation will focus on George Buchanan’s writing practices to discuss how he was able to write both the secretary and italic hand. The presentation will show how these writing practices were connected to European humanism and how such use of scripts was intentional and linked to Buchanan’s writing needs and the perspective reader’s needs.

Anna-Nadine Pike: ‘Medieval’ approaches to early-modern script and books, through the manuscripts of Esther Inglis (1570/1-1624) 

As an early-modern calligraphy tradition develops across the sixteenth century, newly-published writing-manuals construct the image of a previous age of scribal production. Considering the traditions which they now inherit, their producers decide what to preserve of past scribal traditions, what to discard, and how this age should be remembered. Reformed theology, meanwhile, also encourages a move away from the affectivity of the late-medieval book, where materiality, script, and image had previously facilitated modes of reading in which the physical form of a text also conditions its meaning. Against these dual contexts, this paper will consider how elements of late-medieval manuscript production endure into post-reformation, early-modern scribal activities in Britain. Beginning with wider professional scribal networks, it will concentrate on the “medievalisms” at play in the manuscripts of Esther Inglis, a Franco-Scottish Huguenot scribe. Inglis’ polygraphic and miniature manuscripts make continued visual and conceptual reference to pre-reformation scribal traditions. She adapts styles of illumination drawn from fifteenth-century Books of Hours; she produces books encourage affective, haptic engagement. She also invites an approach to calligraphy through which script becomes performative; through Inglis’ manuscripts, newly-developed early-modern scripts reclaim some of the affectivity associated with pre-reformation devotional manuscripts. A cross-period approach to Inglis’ work not only allows her manuscripts to be interpreted anew; it also understands early-modern scribal traditions as conscious of their relationship with the past, and continues to complicate narratives of change in textual and devotional practices effected by the reformation.