Tradition cursive et style dans l’écriture des notaires florentins (v. 1250-v. 1350)

Abstract

The relationship between the cursive modus scribendi and the modus typical of books in the late Middle Ages remains to be analysed, both in terms of material facts and historical and cultural issues. This study examines the handwriting of Florentine notaries from the mid-thirteenth to the mid-fourteenth century. Whereas the main structural elements remained essentially unchanged (i. e. individual letter forms, ductus, and rules for combining letters into words), notarial scripts show considerable variety in features of execution and style. A strong correlation between both modi scribendi may be observed in the similarity between single strokes and letters, as well as in letter combination. Moreover, notaries were able to master different kinds of execution and style, belonging on the whole to two opposite types: one written currenti calamo, and the other built up from separate strokes and quite similar to littera textualis in the manner that letters were combined in words. Therefore, writing currenti calamo should be seen as a specific option, a feature of style. In fact, the main difference between the two modi scribendi seems to amount to no more than features of execution and style: book scripts and document scripts were essentially distinguished by the figurae of ascenders and descenders, which scribes could treat in various manners, but with hardly any effect on the fundamental rules for combining letters into words.