A History of Learning to Write

9 A History of Learning to Write EWAN CLAYTON W I begin with a brief background account of the in the way handwriting is understood. Over the last origins of our present letterforms and how they half-century our knowledge of its history has developed arrived in England. This story has its starting point in in detail but not in perspective; new areas of scholar- Renaissance Italy; the Gothic hands of the Middle ship and technology are now changing that. Recent Ages, their origins in the twelfth century and the studies of the history of reading have opened our eyes Anglo-Saxon, early European and late Roman cursives to the sheer variety of ways in which we read; privately that came before them are a subject in their own right. or in public, skimming, reflectively, slowly and repeat- The focus here is on the sixteenth century, an extra- edly; in church, kitchen, library, train or bed. People ordinary period in which all our contemporary have not always read the same way; reading has a his- concerns about handwriting have their roots. Study tory. Handwriting, too, has a history and is practised of the intervening five centuries challenges the view in an equally rich diversity of ways. We write differ- that there is nothing more to be said than to list ently when we copy notes for revision or annotate writing masters and convey a vague feeling that it was the margins of a report, the handwriting on our tele- downhill all the way. In fact it was. An understanding phone pad is different from that in a letter of sym- of the origins of our present day scripts helps us to pathy or on a birthday card, the draft of a poem or see that the sub-text underlying most discussions on the cheque written at the supermarket checkout is handwriting is our changing definitions of what it is yet again different from the ‘printing’ on our tax to be human. This may account for some of the heat return. Over our lifetime our different writings also that discussion of handwriting often generates. continue to change. Most literature on handwriting treats it as an undifferentiated phenomenon. In Handwriting: Everyone's Art we want to look at this The handwriting we use today is rooted in the scripts area afresh, not proclaiming allegiance to this or that associated with the Italian Renaissance. These scripts system but simply focusing attention on what is can be divided generically into the humanistic book- actually already there. hand which provided our roman lower-case letters This essay seeks to explore the diversity of hand- and italic, a cursive hand which became the source writing practices by concentrating on just one issue, of our joined-up writing; both evolved in the first few namely how handwriting has been taught. This focus decades of the fifteenth century amongst a circle of reveals handwriting to be one of the areas where our scholars based in Florence. The changes that led to presence to ourselves (self-identity rather than per- these developments had started much earlier in the sonality) is simultaneously forged and disclosed as universities of northern Italy when individuals were we conform to or diverge from cultural models and reawakening to a current of vitality in the surviving work with body and mind in an integrated or dis- literature of the Roman world. This would be the associated way. motivating force of the Renaissance. One scholar in 10 : ’ 2 Humanistic minuscule. British Library Add. Ms 50002. Italy, last decade of 3 GF Cresci,Writing manual. Rome 1560 the fifteenth century [By permission of the British Library particular, Petrarch (–), living far from his choice for those who wished to associate themselves native Florence, at the papal court in Avignon, gave with the new spirit in scholarship and the arts that force to this movement through his imaginative recre- spread from northern Italy. The hand was probably ations of the classical world. Combining a passionate first introduced to Britain by Peter Carmelianus, Latin idealism with careful scholarship he reanimated the Secretary (Foreign Secretary) to Henry VII. Edward cultural legacy of the ancient world and passed this VI and Elizabeth I both wrote the hand, and Cambridge enthusiasm on to a new generation of followers University seems to have had many scholars who exper- amongst whom was Coluccio Salutati (–), imented with the style. Chancellor of Florence. Salutati was a great collector In , in Rome, the first printed writing instruc- of rediscovered classical works. It was he who encour- tion manual was published by Ludovico degli Arrighi, aged his copyists to experiment with clearer forms of a scribe working in the papal chancery. Other manuals lettering, to ensure accurate and accessible texts. His for a specialist audience (largely secretaries) followed copyists, principally Poggio Bracciolini, looked for of which the most significant were the writing their inspiration to northern Italian writing of the book of the Venetian scribe Tagliente and Giovanni early twelfth century when letterforms, based upon Battista Palatino's Libro Nuovo d'imparare a scrivere Caroline minuscule, were open and round, unlike tutte sorte lettere antiche e moderne di tutte nationi, later compressed and abbreviated Gothic writing. The first printed in . Palatino's book is interesting for letters that Poggio developed, known to us today as what it tells us about the ordinary writing of that humanistic minuscule (fig. ), were the emblems of time. Most documents in the sixteenth century were modernity when printing was introduced to Italy in still written in varieties of Gothic cursive and Palatino the mid-fifteenth century. In order to compete with illustrates examples of such hands from Milan, Rome, contemporary scribes printers adopted these letter- Venice, Florence, Sienna and Genoa. In fact almost forms for the Italian market. every great commercial centre or large organisation The cursive writing associated with the Italian such as the papal writing office had developed its own humanists, italic, was probably the invention of variety of writing. Writing was not as homogeneous Niccolò Niccoli, another Florentine scholar in the as it is today and there were many different styles in circle of Salutati and Poggio. He combined the open use concurrently. letters of humanistic minuscule with the diagonal With hindsight, we can see that the most influential joining stroke used in running forms of Gothic manuals of the sixteenth century were those produced writing. Popularised amongst scribes and scholars in by Giovanni Francesco Cresci, a scriptor in the Vatican Florence, this new hand was adopted by the papal Library (fig. ). He criticised the work of earlier mas- chancery in Rome and became the handwriting of ters as too slow and deliberate, ‘a thing of angles and 11 points’ with narrow letters that were difficult to join writing to a list of writing masters and their books, with diagonal ligatures. He introduced a rounder this would obscure very real differences in the way it form, easier ligatures and an increased slope which was understood and practised. Reading and writing made the script faster to write. This set the pattern were taught separately; many people were taught to for the ‘Italian’ hand that would be influential read but not everybody went on to write. Writing was throughout Europe during the commercial expansion taught on a need-to-know rather than a universal of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. basis. So the well-born, doctors, clergymen, business- men, lawyers, book-keepers, and their clerks and secretaries learned to write. Some evidently taught them- The first writing manual printed in England A Booke selves from manuals but usually students enrolled in Containing Divers Sortes of Hands by Jean de a writing master’s academy for day or evening classes. Beauchesne and John Baildon was published in . Learning to write was a complex business requiring Other books followed including The Pens Excellencie the mastery of several hands and the avoidance of other () by Martin Billingsley, writing tutor to the future scripts as inappropriate for one's social station, profes- Charles I, Edward Cocker's The Pen's Trancendencie sion or gender. The counting house and commercial (), John Ayres's A Tutor to Penmanship () and world stressed hands that were round, simple and clear George Bickham's The Universal Penman () .Over (fig ); a legal clerk would have to master a variety of the next three centuries these books and others led to court, chancery and engrossing hands, and men of variations on Italian scripts replacing the system of leisure affected a distinguishing carelessness in their Gothic and secretary hands which had developed in writing. Women were taught a different hand to men, England from the twelfth century onwards; but for a narrow, sloping hand (fig. ) often regarded merely several centuries these systems existed side by side as an accomplishment, a skill for the leisured, like (figs. ). In the s only the nobility and their needlework or dancing. This practice continued into secretaries along with university academics wrote the nineteenth century. Handwriting was withheld italic. By the early seventeenth century the Italian hand had developed in two directions: a narrow, sloped ‘roman’ considered appropriate for women's writing and a stripped-down version suitable for commerce. The later style, eventually known as English round hand, was initially modified from the Italian version by French and Dutch writing masters such as Lucas Materot (active ), Louis Barbedor (–) and Jan van den Velde (–), all of whom were admired by Samuel Pepys who, inciden- tally, was a keen follower of writing masters and collector of their work. It seems likely that it was through Dutch traders, the most successful merchant class of the first half of the seventeenth century, that this kind of writing came to influence ordinary correspondence in England, just as it was through English traders that round hand would eventually become popularised through most of the rest of Europe and in the colonies.

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