I don’t doubt that handwriting analysis can have specific practical or scholarly applications.  I imagine the well-established techniques used by palaeographers to identify archaising scripts (or, conversely, to identify manuscripts copied by the same hand) – attention to the minute idiosyncrasies of letter formation and the duct of the scribes’ handwriting – aren’t too different to those involved in proving a modern forgery.  Since such identifications can be the subject of scholarly disagreement, any ambitious claims for modern handwriting analysis need to be viewed with considerable scepticism.

Any attempt to apply graphology in the realms of psychology or medicine, however, just seems like bald charlatanism to me.  Even where the stakes are far lower – in this case, occupational recruitment – I’m far from convinced of its usefulness.  Like astrologers, chiromancers or psychics, graphologists stick to the vague and avoid the specific, and use evidence already given to them by the person they’re reading: literally, in this case, since graphologists usually study a handwritten personal statement rather than a neutral piece of writing and have spectacularly failed to give accurate descriptions when confronted with a neutral sample of handwriting.

The French attachment to graphology is a cultural one – they invented it, so it’s not surprising they remain attached to it – but it is used elsewhere, in Germany, Switzerland and Israel.  Psychometric tests were, in their modern form, an American invention and remain more popular in the Anglophone world, though not to the exclusion of graphology.  Indeed, graphology may be catching on on this side of La Manche.  A growing number of companies justify its use as an additional screening tool because it is cheap and they claim it offers a fresh perspective on a candidate that CVs do not.

Could this perception that the manuscript word is more ‘personal’ than the printed or digital word – at a time when the future relationship between all three remains unclear – be a reaction against recruitment processes that have been rendered increasingly impersonal by e-mailed CVs and the use of online application systems?  A 1990 report by the Law Society Gazette cautioned that – regardless of doubts about graphology’s credibility – European law states that submitted applications are the property of the recruiter.  He or she may legally (though perhaps not ethically) send it for analysis without acquiring the applicant’s consent.  So, when you’re next asked to provide something in manuscript – caveat scriptor! – you’ve no idea where it might end up.

This morning members of the University of Cambridge were taken on a particularly creative phishing trip:

“Dear Staff/Student,

As phishing schemes become more sophisticated, with phishers being able to convince up to 50% of recipients to respond, it has become increasingly important for the Webmaster of The University of Cambridge to upgrade the University’s Webmail server to the new and more secured 2013 version.

This will enable your webmail take a new look, with virus protection and anti-spam Security. You are advised to verify and upgrade your account to the University’s 2013 latest Webmail version to enable recommended advanced features.

To verify your account, please click and follow the verification link below for the required upgrade or simply copy and paste the link into your web browser;

[link deleted, for obvious reasons]

To ensure full protection of your account, please take a few minutes now – it could save you a lot of time and frustration later.”

It’s ingenious, isn’t it? Shades of Shakespeare’s Iago, pretending that he wants to keep Othello from harm at the same time as he destroys his marriage and his mind. I particularly like ‘with phishers being able to convince up to 50% of recipients to respond’–such modesty!

The AHRC-funded exhibition ‘The Brownlows in Italy: Books and Continental Travel’, curated by Abigail Brundin and Dunstan Roberts as part of the CMT National Trust Libraries project, runs at Belton House in Lincolnshire until 3 November 2013.

So that CMT members can enjoy a private view of the house and the exhibition, we are organizing a day-trip to Belton on *Monday 10 June*. Minibuses will leave from Chesterton Road at 8.30, returning to Cambridge by 5.

The visit is free, but pre-booking is required and places are limited. Please drop a line to Jason Scott-Warren (jes1003) and Abigail Brundin (asb17@cam.ac.uk) if you would like to come.

For more information about the house and the project, see > http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/belton-house/ and http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/cmt/?p=2925. A poster for the exhibition can be downloaded here.

While the Vie received vast numbers of printed rebuttals, Renan himself was subjected to a torrent of letters from all over France and beyond its borders. Some of the letters were from readers who had experienced the  book as a kind of revelation that brought the historical Jesus to life for the first time. But others were savagely hostile, calling the writer an animal and telling him that he would burn in hell for his lack of faith. A third type of communication came from those who sought to bring Renan back to the fold by gentler means, often with prayer cards depicting the Sacred Heart, significant terms underlined so as to drive home the message more directly. Taken together these letters testify to the extent to which the Vie (published in a cheap, simplified edition in 1864, and issued with illustrations in 1870) had penetrated French society, attracting readers among the rural poor as well as among urban elites. And they show how much controversy it continued to cause, while the author sat back and declined to comment on the furore.

For the modern reader, these letters can’t but seem prescient of internet commentings, and of the virulent work of the troll, who employs the invisibility cloak of anonymity to post flagrantly offensive messages. (The recent trolling case involving Cambridge academic Mary Beard was widely publicized). But while anonymity was also a feature in much of Renan’s hate mail, Priest emphasized that these were not proto-posts. With no established line of communication, and no evidence of a concerted campaign of writing, each letter was the result of an individual initiative by the sender, an experiment pitting the power of handwriting against the force of print.

Trinity College, Junior Parlour

The Cambridge Medieval Palaeography Workshop is a new forum for informal discussion on medieval script and scribal practices, and on the presentation, circulation and reception of texts in their manuscript contexts. It is hoped to hold a series of workshops annually in the Easter Term, each focusing upon a particular issue, and usually explored through a pair of short presentations and discussion.

10 May           Liturgical texts in their manuscript contexts

Henry Parkes   ‘Visual hierarchy in eleventh-century “liturgical” texts’

Erik Niblaeus ‘Twelfth-Century Breviary Fragments in the Swedish National Archives’

17 May            The process of development in script

David Ganz     ‘Irish cursive script: scribes, styles and development’

Chris Voth      ‘The manuscript evidence for the beginnings of English Square Minuscule’

24 May            The palaeography of musical notation

Eduardo Aubert ‘The notions of pure and mixed (neumatic) scripts in the light of tenth- and eleventh-century sources from Burgundy’

Giovanni Varelli ‘Ransacking the “toolbox” of tenth-century Italian music scribes: reflections on a first survey’

All welcome. For further information, contact the workshop convenors, Tessa Webber (mtjw2@cam.ac.uk) and David Ganz (ganz.palaeography@gmail.com)

The Junior Parlour is on T staircase, Blue Boar Court, located on the opposite side of Trinity Street from the main entrance to the College (next door to Brora). Enter from Trinity Street through the covered archway; go up steps on the right. The entrance to T staircase is half-way up the steps on the right.

Thursday 2 May

Robert Priest (History, Cambridge), ‘Writing to Ernest Renan: Fan Mail, Hate Mail and the Historical Jesus in Nineteenth-Century France’

Thursday 16 May

Lucy Razzall (English, Cambridge), ‘Thinking Inside the Box: Containers and the Materiality of Early Modern Texts’

All welcome. Wine & soft drinks will be served at the start of the seminar.

For more information, please contact Jason Scott-Warren (jes1003@cam.ac.uk), Andrew Zurcher (aez20@cam.ac.uk) or Dunstan Roberts (dcdr2@cam.ac.uk)

In particular, a sequence of poems that Lawrence wrote in 1916, in which he was fiercely critical of the imperialist ventures of the British army in the Middle East, was rendered meaningless by the refusal of publishers (in the wake of the banning of The Rainbow) to print explicit references to places such as Salonika and Mesopotamia. According to the volume’s editor, Christopher Pollnitz, early readers would have ‘found little that they could understand in these poems beyond two facts, that they were by D.H. Lawrence and referred obliquely to war’.

You can read more about this historic publication, which rounds off CUP’s 40-volume Lawrence edition, here.