The Macclesfield Alphabet

By -
The Macclesfield Alphabet Book: a Facsimile, ed. Christopher de Hamel and Patricia Lovett

After reading Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts, I wondered what else de Hamel might have produced, and I found this neat book!  With the magic of InterLibrary Loan, it was soon in my hands.

This is a facsimile of an unusual manuscript.  It's not very long, and it dates from the late 1400s.  It's a sort of design or idea book for the fancy initials in illuminated manuscripts!  It contains fourteen different kinds of decorative letters: a sort of blackletter type, several with leaves, and some very whimsical alphabets made of human and animal figures.  Most aren't colored in or anything; they're diagrams.

It's a lot of fun to look at and full of great design ideas.  I'm very tempted to use some of them in embroidery, and maybe someday I will (I've got plenty to do right now).  If you're interested in lettering, this is a great resource!





Comments

  1. MarkMarch 27, 2018 at 7:11 AM

    The British Library acquired this a few years back, and have put a scan of it online.

    ReplyDelete
  2. BookTapestryMarch 27, 2018 at 11:41 AM

    Thanks for this spectacular find! The link to the British Library's online images is: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Add_MS_88887

    ReplyDelete
  3. JeanMarch 27, 2018 at 9:21 PM

    Thanks!! I will use these, woohoo!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more