Palaeography I heart you

Today my job is going through manuscripts page by page making little notes like "f. 52, small tear in the outer margin" so that we have a record of their state before they go down to the digilab, and also so that if I come across anything that needs sorting out first we can get Melvin the friendly conservator on it. Because we each mostly do this to the manuscripts which we will later bibliograph, I get to do the pre-1100 stuff. This is really the only way to work if you are going to try to be a palaeographer: you need to see lots of things page by page, letting the impressions build up in your mind. That's why Humfrey Wanley, my hero insofar as one can have a hero in this crazy post-modern world, was able to pretty much come up with English palaeography from scratch: he spent decades looking at manuscripts first in the Bodleian and then as librarian to the Harleys. He copied scripts carefully, sought out manuscripts and fragments, and compared them to other specimens. Three centuries later most of his judgements still stand, and his opinion is still worth consulting. (Especially on things lost or damaged in the 1731 Cottonian fire.)

This long-term study or silence before manuscripts is not such an option these days. You know I'm about to mention the RAE; but even before that, at PhD level, you have to commit yourself to judgements which should be made after decades of learning. I talked to my supervisor about this one, back when I was having trouble believing I could ever finish my thesis, and he just said I was quite right -- unless you're a genius you can't do palaeography until your forties or fifties. Not especially consoling, but my supervisor is not a man for sugar-coating or weaselling.

Today I have seen all of Corpus MS. 206. It has previously been thought to be Continental, now mostly agreed to be English. I see as I go through it that it is written in Caroline minuscule, with a lot of Late Celtic features, like the 2-shaped est, and that it uses old "Celtic" abbreviations like pr for pater. This is making me think of two possible contexts: Brittany, though I'm not sure how much Late Celtic features ever got a hold there since they came into use at about the same time as Brittany started to lose its Celticness (in terms of script); and the early take-up of Caroline in England, which was heavily influenced by Irish and Welsh stuff for reasons no one properly understands. There is an unusual form of r, as well. I make notes on these things in the hope that in twenty years' time it will suddenly come to me.

Only in the ASNC department would it ever have been possible for me to study English and "Celtic" scripts together, and this is why scholars elsewhere think you can write about English Square minuscule without mentioning Welsh National Hand. (I lament because I see this tradition dying from term to term in the one place where it should have been safe.) If I had five years to study I would look at Continental Caroline minuscule and see as many manuscripts as I could. But I certainly couldn't promise that at the end I would write the definitive guide to Continental Caroline minuscule, so it's not something I will ever be able to do. I hope to be able to get a permanent job one day in a manuscript collection, because it seems the only way I'll ever get to be a proper palaeographer.