Lesson 9: Follow-Up

This manuscript is by far the messiest and roughest material so far presented in the course; unfortunately, this kind of presentation is characteristic of many of the historical and literary manuscripts you are likely to encounter, and many are likely to be much more challenging: ink blots, damage to the paper/vellum, heavy corrections or deletions, brittle paper or faded ink, and crabbed or inelegant writing can prove exhausting to a patient transcriber. When facing a text as sloppy and tangled as this, remember to advance letter by letter, looking for every clue that you can. In instances like the deletion here in line 10 of the text, where the writer has added 'then' above the line, you may at first find the confusion of strokes baffling. Start by trying to decide how many letters there are, based on the hand's general spacing and any conspicuous loops or ascenders visible; if you still cannot make any headway, try beginning at the end of the word and work backwards. Here you might make out the final n and then feel fairly confident that the preceding letter was reverse e or d; given the n, it is much more likely to be e! The th combination is somewhat more challenging, but the word will instantly jump out if you consider the long loop below the deletion, which is actually part of the h; only one letter in this hand could be responsible for such a ravishing sublinear flight.

Can you make out any of the three deletions on this page (try the zoomed view)?

For further recipes from this manuscript, see item 27 on the 'index of manuscript images', or click on the links below.

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