Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1985, Blaðsíða 90
82
ing’.77 The scribe of the Dalhousie manuscript would doubtless
normally have reserved his set hånd for brief texts like art. 7, and only
continued it into the lengthy art. 8 by an oversight which he quickly
corrected. His employment of cursive script in the bulk of the manu-
script was in line with contemporary practice in the writing of histo-
rical and literary texts, where speed and economy of physical effort
were the prime considerations.
The predominantly cursive hånd of the Dalhousie scribe is,
however, by no means lacking in elegance. It is a “pre-Secretary” hånd
displaying certain features adopted from French document hånds of
the fifteenth century. Among these French characteristics may be
mentioned the pronounced development of “horns” at the top of the
letters e and t seen e.g. in plate III, line 20 Crete; less stably developed
is the French form of c (compare colunt in the same line with plate Ila,
line 1 circumfusus) .78 The separation of e into independent elements
not joined by a hairline and merging with the preceding and following
letters is perhaps the most extreme single manifestation of this cursive
style. On the other hånd, the Dalhousie scribe also employs the non-
cursive form of this letter (e.g. plate Ila, line 8 Vetus), and several
other non-cursive forms compete with their cursive alternatives in this
manuscript. Examples are d and / with (pre-Humanist) simple ascen-
der (cf. plate III, lines 4-5 did, all); but where the Dalhousie scribe
freely uses the looped variant of l (e.g. plate III, line 13 callit), he
seems reluctant to write looped d (an isolated example has been noted
at f. 22v18 and). This admixture of forms is an obvious symptom of a
period of transition, but it may also reflect a desire on the part of the
scribe to maintain a more dignified style in what might be called
serious book-production.79 Distinctly conservative is the scribe’s pre-
77 Thomson/Innes, Vitae Dunkeldensis ecclesiae episcoporum (as n. 71), p. 59; cf.
Hannay, Rentale Dunkeldense, p. xi, and Grant G. Simpson, Scottish Handwriting 1150-
1650: An Introduction to the Reading of Documents (1973; re-issued Aberdeen, 1977),
p. 12.
78 For examples and analysis of “pre-Secretary” Scottish cursive script see M. B.
Parkes, English Cursive Book Hånds 1250-1500 (Oxford, 1969), plate 13 (ii), and Simp-
son, Scottish Handwriting, plates 11-14.
79 This would seem to be the rationale of the more conservative scripts written in
Scotland in the first half of the sixteenth century: for an example from a manuscript of
John Bellenden’s Livy see Simpson, plate 17.