Dating and placing Visigothic script codices: A quick guide for beginners

Abstract

[EN] Looking at a medieval manuscript, regardless of what our eye is expecting to find, our mind instantly opens to a period in which handwriting was much more than a means to an end that allowed people to communicate. The script, the ideas put into writing, were respected for their legal meaning when building charters and cartularies, and for their spiritual connection as tangible representations of the sacred word when composing ecclesiastical or liturgical codices. Something that was important enough to be written deserved from the people who wrote, copied, read and saw manuscripts a deep respect that is difficult for us to imagine today, our modern eyes being more familiar with writing and reading in digital format. With the purpose of digging into that atmosphere of medieval handwritten culture, historians approach material sources with an open mind, reading and interpreting the texts preserved, while specialists of manuscript studies try to reveal how these manuscript were created, their history. Nowadays the questions with which we interrogate a medieval manuscript might not have changed, but our way of ‘looking’ at a source to answer them has, our options are enriched. A digital surrogate of a medieval manuscript offers endless options to alter an image to confirm or refute a theory. To palaeographers, it provides the opportunity to keep a sample of the script to which one can come back later, maybe to look again with a different question, from a different angle, or with more experienced eyes. All the efforts of specialists working on manuscripts aim to better understand medieval text; to learn more about the people who read, wrote and copied that text; who were they, when the manuscript was made, in which cultural context, and to what purpose. Most of the time, particularly when working with charters or cartularies, there are clues directly embedded in the text to help answer these questions. When the primary source is a codex, though, colophons are rather infrequent or unreliable, thus leaving many of these queries unanswered. Textual research can reconstruct the life of the text contained in a codex, how it spread through scriptoria over the centuries. Codicological analysis can provide equally significant information about the tradition in which the archaeology of the codex fits. Palaeography can deconstruct the strokes that make each letter to provide a place and a date for a manuscript to start to build an idea of its context. Medieval history provides the methodology with which to encompass all this information, closing a circle of interdisciplinary collaboration. Through years of palaeographic analysis, scholars have identified unique features that allow the cultural contextualisation of each medieval script: specific features or graphic characteristics which point towards a defined historical period and to a particular place. This essay re-examines the most significant graphic evidence that has been discussed to help date and place codices written or copied in Visigothic minuscule script, the characteristic hand of the medieval Iberian Peninsula; it will also briefly refer to the new digital methods that could help, in the near future, to better test and reconsider this evidence.