From: owner-scribes@castle.org (scribes digest) To: scribes-digest@castle.org Subject: scribes digest V6 #1 Reply-To: Sender: owner-scribes@castle.org Errors-To: owner-scribes@castle.org Precedence: bulk scribes digest Thursday, June 21 2001 Volume 06 : Number 001 ======================================================================== To unsubscribe from this list, send email to with unsubscribe scribes-digets in the body of the message. Leave the subject line blank. Do not include any additional text. [scribes]: Re: Period punctuation Re: [scribes]: Re: Period punctuation [scribes]: digest archive now available Re: [scribes]: digest archive now available RE: [scribes]: digest archive now available [scribes]: my documentation as promised [scribes]: pricelist [scribes]: Known World website ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 20:13:40 -0400 From: Elizabeth Blatt Subject: [scribes]: Re: Period punctuation At 05:50 PM 6/17/01, Helena Ochastka wrote: >Does anyone know of any good references for the punctuation that is >appropriate to use with different scripts? Drogin's _Medieval >Calligraphy_ talks about it a little bit, but I'd really like to find >something more detailed if possible. I'm particularly interested in what >was used with old Uncial, Insular, Caroline minuscule, and late-period >Gothic hands. Oh, what a fun topic! A caveat on punctuation: it was seldom more than a haphazard process in the Middle Ages and Late Antiquity: different types of punctuation to indicate different types of pauses can vary, as well as from script to script, also country to country, scribe to scribe, and year to year within the same script; and sometimes even within a single manuscript produced by a single scribe the punctuation used to indicate the same type of pause might vary. My suggestion would be to obtain a few examples (from the same time period and country) of the type of script of which you want to learn about the punctuation, and see how each example uses punctuation. If those examples are transcribed, it'll be easier--you can see how the modern transcriber interprets the punctuation. Here are a few initial places you can begin looking: Guilio Battelli's _Lezioni di Palaeographica_, pp. 212-15. Bernhard Bischoff's _Latin Palaeography_, pp. 169-173. N. Denholm-Young's _Handwriting in England and Wales_, pp. 77-79. Julian Brown, "Punctuation" in his _Selected Writings_, pp. 79-86. E. A. Lowe, "The Oldest Omission Signs in Latin Manuscripts" in his _Paleographical Papers_, ed. by Ludwig Bieler, vol. ii, pp. 349-80 and plates 61-70. Patrick McGurk, "Citation Marks in Early Latin Manuscripts" in _Scriptorium_ 15 (1961), pp. 3-13 and plates 1-4. Isidore of Seville, who wrote in the late 6th/early 7th centuries, provides an early period discussion of punctuation in his _Etymologies_, particularly in Book II, section xviii (on the colon, comma, and period). The concept of written punctuation in medieval scripts developed out of rhetorical practices: they developed from cues to indicate *vocal* effects. Because of this, you'll find punctuation marks to indicate short pauses, mid-length pauses, and long pauses. Other types of punctuation you can expect to run into at different times for different scripts are question marks, hyphens, parentheses, paragraph marks, and exclamation points. Sometimes the only punctuation was breaking lines of text at pauses. (I can provide a brief overview on some of these for some of the scripts in which you're interested, based on xeroxes of facsimiles I have; just let me know if you're interested.) Works on specific scripts are more likely to give an overview of basic types of punctuation used by particular scripts; Battelli does a little of this; and Bischoff's book provides a good initial bibliography broken down by specific scripts which you can reference for more sources. Michelle Brown's _Guide to Western Historical Scripts_ provides manuscript pages with transcriptions, and is fairly easily accessible. Bischoff also provides facsimile pages with transcriptions. And Steffens' _Lateinische Palaographie_ (3rd ed., Berlin, reprint 1964) provides tons of plates with transcriptions. A nice overview of punctuation terminology is available online at http://www.ualberta.ca/~sreimer/ms-course/course/punc.htm Good luck hunting! Elianora Mathewes Dominion of Myrkfaelinn, AE =================================================================== To unsubscribe from this list, send email to with a blank Subject: line and unsubscribe scribes in the body of the message. Do not include any additional text in the body. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 22:35:10 -0600 From: Catie Helm-Clark Subject: Re: [scribes]: Re: Period punctuation wow, Elianora, that was awesome! but now I'm chagrinned with myself that there are paleography books in your list that I haven't even heard of before (as well as two of my favorites, which is some comfort to my bruised and fragile ego...), so obvious I've been slacking in my research ;-) Oh well, back to my friends at the interlibrary loan desk... no, seriously, your's was the sort of post I pull off the list and put into one of my stashes on references. (There's no such thing as too many references, unless, of course, the journal you want to publish in has page charges...) ttfn, formerly Therasia =================================================================== To unsubscribe from this list, send email to with a blank Subject: line and unsubscribe scribes in the body of the message. Do not include any additional text in the body. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 22:11:52 -0700 From: Lee Damon Subject: [scribes]: digest archive now available This is *not* automated yet, and the digests are in no way searchable, but all of the digests I have, going back to 23 JAN, 1998, have been posted to . Please respect my bandwith limitations and don't grab all 2,564 digests at one time. Eventually, someday, maybe I'll get around to putting a search engine on them, but that isn't likely to happen any time soon. However, give google a few days and maybe it'll do that for me. :) As I remember to, I'll copy new digests into place. Eventually I'll automate that as well. CT/nomad ----------- - Lee "nomad" Damon - \ play: nomad@castle.org or castle!nomad \ work: nomad@ee.washington.edu \ /\ Seneschal, Castle PAUS. / \ "Celebrate Diversity" / \ =================================================================== To unsubscribe from this list, send email to with a blank Subject: line and unsubscribe scribes in the body of the message. Do not include any additional text in the body. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 22:26:35 -0700 From: Lee Damon Subject: Re: [scribes]: digest archive now available REPLY DIRECTLY TO ME, NOT TO THE LIST: What do people think of having the digests posted on the web? Are you concerned about email addresses being captured for spam? Do you care one way or the other? If there is an outcry to remove, I'll remove the digests. Let me know what you think. Again, do *not* reply to the list, email directly to me. CT/nomad ----------- - Lee "nomad" Damon - \ play: nomad@castle.org or castle!nomad \ work: nomad@ee.washington.edu \ /\ Seneschal, Castle PAUS. / \ "Celebrate Diversity" / \ =================================================================== To unsubscribe from this list, send email to with a blank Subject: line and unsubscribe scribes in the body of the message. Do not include any additional text in the body. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 22:29:07 -0700 From: "Ken Stoner" Subject: RE: [scribes]: digest archive now available Hmmm... I bet that would could write some scripting to grab the digests and post them to www.scribes.org (when I finally get a static IP) and From there we could use SharePoint and SQLServer tools (which I get for for free, and are easy for me to maintain) to allow people to search, etc. We should talk on this. You know the Unix side... I know the dos side, let's collaborate. Ken -----Original Message----- From: Lee Damon [mailto:nomad@castle.org] Sent: Sunday, June 17, 2001 10:12 PM To: scribes@castle.org Subject: [scribes]: digest archive now available This is *not* automated yet, and the digests are in no way searchable, but all of the digests I have, going back to 23 JAN, 1998, have been posted to . Please respect my bandwith limitations and don't grab all 2,564 digests at one time. Eventually, someday, maybe I'll get around to putting a search engine on them, but that isn't likely to happen any time soon. However, give google a few days and maybe it'll do that for me. :) As I remember to, I'll copy new digests into place. Eventually I'll automate that as well. CT/nomad ----------- - Lee "nomad" Damon - \ play: nomad@castle.org or castle!nomad \ work: nomad@ee.washington.edu \ /\ Seneschal, Castle PAUS. / \ "Celebrate Diversity" / \ =================================================================== To unsubscribe from this list, send email to with a blank Subject: line and unsubscribe scribes in the body of the message. Do not include any additional text in the body. =================================================================== To unsubscribe from this list, send email to with a blank Subject: line and unsubscribe scribes in the body of the message. Do not include any additional text in the body. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 23:43:32 -0600 From: Catie Helm-Clark Subject: [scribes]: my documentation as promised A number of people asked for copies of the documentation I put together for the Artemisia Arts and Sciences competition last month. I also told folks I would put on my website the class notes and handouts from my poisons lecture that I gave at Uprising last week. Well, I now have enough files there that I feel safe to tell people that the site is now available for viewing. The pages on verdigris and lead white aren't up yet, but the pages on the illuminated "O", the silver project and the poisons class are now on-line. Vermilion, azurite, and yellow ochre are on-line also. Please keep in mind that these are documentation for contest entries, and unfortunately I don't have pictures of all the entries to put on the web site, so the documentation texts may sound a bit odd as I describe something that you can't look at. Well, I'm working on that, but taking pictures and scanning photos takes time, and I'm about to fall off the face of the earth for the next few weeks as I get my furniture (including the husband) moved out of California and up here to Idaho. The vermilion page loads much to slowly. As soon as I can figure out what's wrong, it will get fixed. There's no reason for a lousy five-page pdf to take that long - but if you're patient, I think you will find that the wait was worth your while. The yellow ochre and azurite pages are short - perhaps too short for a contest, but I was running out of time to finish my documentation, and several of the entries suffered for it. The azurite docs, by the way, really show quite well why you want to take the time to carefully levigate your pigment. I think you will agree that the first and second levigations compared side by side are an eye-popper. At Artemisia Arts and Sciences, I overheard someone talking about the silver documentation while I was in the ladies room (in a stall, no less, but getting ready to leave). Well, I didn't quite have the guts to walk out past her, and to be honest, I wanted to hear what she had to say uncensored, if you get my drift. So, this anonymous voice was saying that she thought the silver documentation was much too long, and she had originally thought to say something about that to someone (who that would be wasn't clear), but then she got to thinking - here they had been complaining for years that too much documentation was too short and lacked substance, and to complain about the only piece of documentation she had ever considered too long might send the wrong message... I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing. Ain't life grand? :) One of my entries did not congeal in time to take to Artemisia Arts and Sciences. I told my scribal buddy here in the barony that I was sure it would be completely congealed when I got back from the event - and sure enough, it was. [And it was stunningly cool! My last batch of vitriol wasn't anywhere as nice as this one is.] Now the documentation for that entry (which no one has ever seen besides my spousal unit) was only eight pages, instead of 15 pages for the silver. But since the entry didn't make it to the contest this year, I'm sure that I can get the page count up some more before next's year's contest... ;-) ;-) ;-) the web site is www.onewest.net/~no1home/stuff.html ttfn, Therasia =================================================================== To unsubscribe from this list, send email to with a blank Subject: line and unsubscribe scribes in the body of the message. Do not include any additional text in the body. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 22:58:06 -0700 From: "Mary & Curtis Edenfield" Subject: [scribes]: pricelist This is a multi-part message in MIME format. - ------=_NextPart_000_00BA_01C0F780.F8CF8CC0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Sorry to take up the space, but back in the spring I had a list of folks = wanting a price list for pigments and of course it's gotten lost in the = change over from one email program to another. Soooo if you were one of = those folks {or are interested too} please send me a private email to = ladymari@cybertrails.com and I"ll get it right out to you. Thanks Mairi in Atenveldt where it's too darned hot to even think. {Canyon Keep Ent.period pigments & dyes} - ------=_NextPart_000_00BA_01C0F780.F8CF8CC0 Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Sorry to take up the space, but back in the = spring I had a=20 list of folks wanting a price list for pigments and of course it's = gotten lost=20 in the change over from one email program to another. Soooo if you were = one of=20 those folks {or are interested too} please send me a private email to ladymari@cybertrails.com = and I"ll get=20 it right out to you.
 
Thanks
Mairi in Atenveldt where it's too darned hot to = even=20 think.
 
{Canyon Keep Ent.period pigments & = dyes}
 
- ------=_NextPart_000_00BA_01C0F780.F8CF8CC0-- =================================================================== To unsubscribe from this list, send email to with a blank Subject: line and unsubscribe scribes in the body of the message. Do not include any additional text in the body. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2001 08:05:21 EDT From: KATAKIRA@aol.com Subject: [scribes]: Known World website Believe it or not, a work friend found this, and was raving to me about what a cool site it was. Apparently, it's a "global" SCA website: www.KnownWorldWeb.com I've never seen it before, but I thought it was pretty easy to get around, and it's a great idea if they can hang in there. It still seems pretty 'new'. The art & design is really nice. Katarina Peregrine Gwyntarian, Middle www.KnownWorldWeb.com - the ultimate online resource for the SCA community =================================================================== To unsubscribe from this list, send email to with a blank Subject: line and unsubscribe scribes in the body of the message. Do not include any additional text in the body. ------------------------------ End of scribes digest V6 #1 ***************************