About this Hand

 

Bibliographical Information

The discovery and recovery of Ireland, with The Author's Apology
Gonville and Caius College MS 150/200, p. 81

 

Description and Dating

The hand is a careful humanist italic, predating the rise in the seventeenth century of other forms of italic which in the end usurped the secretary hand as the main English hand. This sort of hand was associated with an educational elite in the sixteenth century, and was taught to those sons of the nobility and gentry whose fathers or tutors had a more international outlook - for the hand was an import from the continental humanist movement. Letters written in Latin to correspondents in, say, Germany, France, or Italy would be legible in this hand, far less so in secretary. Because of these associations it was often used to distinguish Latin text from English text in manuscript, in line with a parallel set of conventions in the use of italic, Roman, and black letter fonts in printing. It must be said, however, that neat versions of this hand are most often found in school exercise books and that the volumes of correspondence of the likes of Philip Sidney and Robert Cecil, both of whom were taught hands similar to this, show its rapid degeneration into a fairly modern looking scrawl.

The title and the first word of the epistle are in an engrossing, hybrid book hand, mixing secretary graphs (majscule R) and italic ones. The italic script includes some features found more often in earlier seventeenth-century hands than in later ones, such as the Greek 'e' used in 'travayle' (line 11). Other notable features are the flourishes on the 'g's and the 'k's, the lengthy ascenders on the 'd's, and the 'r's with feet. All these are more typical of an Elizabethan italic than of later italic hands. There are frequent line-fillers, both in the title and in the epistle, in order to justify the text; these have been omitted in the transcription. A date of 1570-1600 seems reasonable.