Anglicana book hands in the fourteenth-century Paris? An attempt at circumscribing the phenomenon.
Abstract. The paper addresses the phenomenon of the use of cursive scripts, belonging to the tradition of the Cursiva antiquior or sometimes more precisely to that of Anglicana, in manuscripts that on various grounds can be localized to Paris. This apparently scant group of artifacts raises questions about the migration of scribes trained in different traditions to Paris and the coexistence of different patterns of book hands.
Richard and Mary Rouses have listed some twenty scribes of certain or apparent English origin who were active in Paris between the end of the thirteenth century and the middle of the fourteenth. As far as extant manuscripts show those hands used a variety of litterae textuales, whereas Anglicana is sporadically found in guidelines for rubricators. More recently has Alison Ray produced evidence of annotations and paratexts added in Anglicana in manuscripts made in Paris, ascribable to their English users rather than scribes themselves. Yet another category of artifacts has emerged from my research into the early manuscript tradition of Nicholas Trevet’s works (Psalter commentary and Latin universal chronicle): manuscripts that on various grounds can be associated with Paris (the style of decoration, early Parisian ownership, place in respective textual traditions) and are written by hands using Anglicana or scripts including its certain features. By confronting this group of manuscripts with several others that display similar characteristics, the paper will seek to assess whether these copies should be attributed to scribes educated across the Channel and active in Paris or they witness to an independent influence of the Cursiva antiquior upon Parisian book hands. This possibly growing category of heterogenous manuscripts will also provide opportunity to address two broader problems pertinent to the study of palaeography, viz. the question of localizing manuscripts that do not bear any explicit information about the place of production and the phenomenon of the use of the Cursiva antiquior as book script.