The artist who painted the initials in this #Renaissance Italian manuscript (@subugoe Cod. MS philol. 116) painted this A upside down so that it now looks like a V. An A was added in the margin as a correction. Did the artist work upside-down, and if so, why?
Pre-modern books are great records of human error and therefore of historic working practices.
This is the handwriting of renowned historian Theodor Mommsen @subugoe. I‘m a trained palaeographer and I can’t read it - not without spending a long time working out the individual letters. But native German speakers who have seen this type of writing before have much less trouble. Cursive #palaeography is all about exposure! @histodons@medievodons@historikerinnen
Two upcoming online lectures next Tuesday, 14 May (alas, their times overlap).
Here's the first, sponsored by the Celtic Studies Association of North America: Sarah Waidler (NYU) will speak on ‘Arthur, Authority and the Saints Revisited’ at 12 noon EDT (= 5 pm BST).
Update from the eManuSkript project: we've mocked up a website with a holistic interface for all the apps; we're starting tagging of the 200GB supplementary training set for our neural network; the students are developing script & #manuscript training sets for online tutorials; and much, much more. I have such a brilliant team!
These are digital #microscope photos of a camel from a 15th-century Persian manuscript in the @subugoe (Cod. MS pers. 14). The purple image was taken with ultraviolet light and the grey picture with infrared. Because infrared goes right through most pigments, it reveals the preliminary sketch of the camel underneath the pigment (which you see in the UV photo). Really interesting for the history of art!