Chapter 6
Since medieval monasteries were central to the production of writing and books, they were threatened by the prospect of being upended by a new device that some claimed would do the same work faster and better. In his essay In Praise of Scribes, the monk Johannes Trithemius made a series of claims against the printing press: “Scripture on parchment can persist a thousand years, but … the printed book is a thing of paper and in a short time will decay entirely,” he proclaimed, and printed texts would be “deficient in spelling and appearance.” “Posterity will judge,” he predicted, “the manuscript book superior to the printed book.”1
Trithemius, like Socrates before him and many who worry about the loss of handwriting today, focused on the same points: The new technology will prove less durable than the old and it will lead to historical amnesia, lesser levels of education, and decreased standards. Unsurprisingly, the most vocal opponents of new technologies are those who dominated the old.
Trithemius was wrong about the durability of print books, but he made another point about handwriting that continues to resonate. Handwriting, he said, was a spiritual act, a form of religious devotion that putting blocks into a press could never be.
Print spread rapidly. Gutenberg’s first Bible was printed in 1450; by 1490 there were forty thousand printed books in circulation. By 1600 that number had increased more than tenfold. Martin Luther would complain that “the multitude of books is a great evil. There is no measure or limit to this form of writing.”2 Erasmus regretted that “in former times pupils at school had to take down so much long-hand that boys wrote rapidly but with difficulty, constantly on the look-out for symbols and for abbreviations to save time … Nowadays the art of printing has led to the situation that some scholars do not write down anything at all!”
Erasmus’s dialogue, published in a printed pamphlet, reminds us that manuscripts persisted after Gutenberg’s invention. People did not suddenly get up from their scriptorium desks, throw away their pens, and start pressing type against paper. The two technologies continued side by side. There were hundreds of thousands of (manuscript) books in circulation before Gutenberg’s press and, afterward, scores of manuscript books continued to be made.*
In fact, the first books, called incunabula, meaning “from the cradle,” look identical to manuscript books produced at the same time and were much less revolutionary than Trithemius’s words suggest. Seen side by side, the first books and the manuscripts of this period are difficult to distinguish one from the other. To mimic so closely the look of familiar books, early printers had to develop laborious, inefficient processes. For instance, Gutenberg’s Bible used red letters at the beginning of each section, as was the practice with manuscripts. This meant each page had to be passed through the press twice and lined up precisely so the red ink appeared in the correct spot. Early printed books included illustrations, often in different colors, so scribes and illustrators were hired to hand-ink a page after it had been printed. Early printed books also included rubrications (additions in red ink), margins, and even guidelines that were standard in scribal manuscripts.
The first font—the print equivalent of a script—also emulated a manuscript. Gutenberg carved into wood a Gothic script that was extremely elaborate, and hired craftsmen to cut and hand-carve the 290 characters needed to print every upper- and lowercase letter, symbol, and punctuation mark so they would look like the ink-drawn versions of the letters scribes were then producing with their pens. This, like the red letters and guidelines, made printed books seem familiar and respectable, easing new readers in. As the future Pope Pius II wrote to Cardinal Carvajel in 1455: “All that has been written to me about that marvelous man seen at Frankfurt [Gutenberg] is true … The script was very neat and legible, and not at all difficult to follow; your grace would be able to read it without effort, and indeed without glasses.”*3
Trithemius and his fellow scribes did ultimately find themselves with less work after printing was introduced. Monks and guildsmen lost a centuries-long monopoly on bookmaking. One scribe, Antonio Sinibaldi, complained while doing his taxes that the printing press had taken so much of his business that he had no money for clothes.4
The printing press created new professional possibilities for those who were good at handwriting, however. Once facing unemployment, scribes shifted gears. Instead of writing a few commissioned a books year, they started to teach penmanship to others though tutoring, classes, and books. These new writing masters traveled around Europe, and eventually the occupation rose higher in prestige than most scribes ever attained; writing masters became wealthy professionals. The profession of secretary also arose, as the age of exploration and new lands brought on more business and governmental bureaucracy and thus more documents to be written and copied. Secretaries had to take dictation, write documents quickly, and know multiple specialized scripts. A particularly good hand could rise someone above his station. Poggio Bracciolini, the possible inventor of humanist script, had such good handwriting that he ascended from poverty to become papal secretary, one of the highest positions a commoner could obtain in Renaissance Europe. Writing masters also published printed books to disseminate their lessons and, ironically, depended on the distribution printing offered to make their fortunes.
The earliest writing masters mainly taught either italics, a version of humanist, or Gothic, depending upon where they were: The French and Italians preferred italics, whereas Germany and Germanic countries favored Gothic. In England, Queen Elizabeth and King Charles I wrote in italics, which they called Italian chancery hand. This script became associated with the Renaissance, while Gothic came to signify the cloistered Dark Ages. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, wealthy Europeans added additional hands that denoted class, gender, and profession. Men of leisure were taught one hand; clerks wrote in another. Most privileged Europeans used one script for a personal letter and another for a legal document.
Because script needed to signal so many things—the type of document (legal, governmental, business, personal) and the type of writer (noble, professional, lowly, male, female)—and varied from country to country, the history of scripts from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century is a dizzying, arcane, and often confusing one.* Some scripts were faddish. In England, secretary hand—a cramped, almost illegible script that took hold in the sixteenth century—was widely adopted. Shakespeare used it. By 1525, secretary hand was the most commonly written English script. But one hundred years later it was rarely used, and by 1700 it was considered archaic.
In England, numerous scripts were developed just for court documents, including chancery hand, Common Pleas, and Exchequer Pipe Office, all used by different officials for various purposes. These scripts became increasingly illegible to anyone not trained in that particular sector. For Charles Dickens, these scripts were symbolic. Bob Cratchit, in A Christmas Carol, is unable to see his sick child on Christmas because he has to write yet another illegible, unnecessary contract or letter; Lady Honoria Dedlock, in Bleak House, is confused by a personal letter written in what appears to be sixteenth-century Chancery hand, a script that was then used exclusively for yet another illegible law hand; a clerk in The Pickwick Papers boasts that he can control court proceedings, “since nobody alive except myself can read the [judge’s] writing, [and] they [the plaintiffs] are obliged to wait for his opinions … till I have copied ’em, ha-ha-ha!”5
Compounding the challenge of deciphering the many different hands, no standardized spelling existed in England (or America) until the seventeenth century. Once English supplanted Latin as the language of business and, thus, writing, people wrote down words in any way that sounded the way it was spoken. Shakespeare spelled his name in a number of different ways. Spelling changed during the sixteenth century as literacy became more widespread and people began to be influenced by the spellings they read—and needed to be able to more clearly communicate through written words. Impromptu spellings invented to best reflect speech sounds gradually became codified and standardized. The same applied to punctuation, which had been largely nonexistent or nonstandardized. Not until the eighteenth century did spelling and punctuation become regularized, and only after spelling guides and even more importantly dictionaries first were created and published during the seventeenth century.
From the sixteenth through the nineteenth century, more people learned to read than write. The two skills were generally taught sequentially: Reading came first, and writing was not included in all lessons. Many women were taught to read but then not taught to write. Thus, there were people who could read even though they could not wield a pen. Those lucky women who were taught to write used their own separate-but-not-equal script. In England they did not use the complicated English secretary hands or the various legal hands. Instead, they wrote in what was called Italian hand, a simpler script for the simpler sex. Martin Billingsley, in a seventeenth-century writing manual, explained women should only be taught Italian hand because “it is conceived to be the easiest hand that is written with Pen, and to be taught in the shortest time: Therefore it is usually taught to women, for as much as they (having not the patience to take any great paines, besides phantasticall and humorsome) must be taught that which they may instantly learn.”6
Despite the variety of hands, each person was expected to use the hand precisely the same as every other person, looking as close as possible to a copy. Scripts by the eighteenth century no longer represented one’s devotion to God or one’s proximity to the pope. Instead they showed one’s wealth, profession, and breeding.
This was true even in that most individualist of places, the New World. From colonial times through the early decades of the nineteenth century, schooling mainly took place in the home, and boys and girls learned very differently (if they learned at all). Literacy was more restricted, and more gender divided, than many assume. Most people living in New England in the eighteenth century did not know how to write. A higher percentage knew how to read: About 60 percent of men and 30 percent of women were literate. Reading was taught by a woman, usually a mother, so children could read scripture.7
Writing, on the other hand, was not usually taught to women at all, and it was taught by men, mainly by writing masters who advertised their services, often for those who wanted to expand their skill set by taking night courses in “Writing and Arithemetick.”8 One master also sold “the best Virginia Tobacco cut, spun into the very best Pigtail … also Snuff, at the cheapest Rates.”9 If a girl was taught writing, it was alongside other domestic skills, such as embroidery, music, and dancing. As one maxim in copybooks put it, “Then let the Fingers, whose unrivall’d Skill, Exalts the Needle, grace the Noble Quill.”10
The first American script, imported from England, was called, appropriately, the Mayflower Century Style of American Writing. It combined English secretary hand with a variation of humanist called round hand. Eventually a distinctively American script emerged, called variously round hand or copperplate, with rounded letters and flourishes as well as thin ascenders and thick descenders. It is to this script we owe those odd superscript abbreviations (“Wm” for “William”) and the long s. The Declaration of Independence is written in round hand.
Despite what we were taught, Thomas Jefferson did not pen the Declaration of Independence, at least not the version we have today. Like other wealthy men of the time, he hired a secretary, who had probably been trained by a writing master, to make a fair copy of the draft he wrote. Records show that after the declaration was approved on July 4, the Continental Congress had it engrossed on parchment, and a month later, on August 2, the fair copy was compared to Jefferson’s version and signed.”11 No one is sure who engrossed that copy, but it is thought a writing master named Timothy Matlack is responsible for the lettering on view under glass in the National Archives.
In seventeenth-century Boston, some public schools had a writing track, akin to what Americans now call vocational education, for people who wanted to rise in rank by being secretaries. Students spent two years learning scripts: bills of sale, receipts, and legal documents all required different hands. University-bound students enrolled in a different track were taught the round hand of a gentleman.
In the colonies as on the continent, writing masters taught future gentlemen but were not themselves of that rank. Many aimed for such genteel status, and they bristled at those who said teaching penmanship was a mere craft, akin to manual labor. To complicate their desired rise in rank, there emerged a double standard that persists today: The more educated and illustrious you were, the worse your handwriting was supposed to be. Thomas De Quincey said of eighteenth-century French aristocrats that they “ambitiously cultivated a poor hand … as if in open proclamation of scorn for the arts by which humbler people oftentimes got their bread.”12 Having a perfect hand could mark one as a parvenu. In what was the final defeat in the attempt to make writing master a lauded profession, writing instruction was feminized. By the 1830s, schools were becoming more common, and they started teaching penmanship as well as reading; female teachers replaced male writing masters as teaching overall became more feminized.
The printing press toppled handwriting off its throne as the de facto way for states and churches to brand themselves through the look of letters, but individuals, with increased access to literacy, were able to take on this role through the heterogeneity of scripts available during this increasingly stratified and bureaucratic time. Eventually, however, individual handwriting was standardized, too. In America, two men developed scripts that would, one after the other, become the universal hand for the nation.
* It’s the same today: For more on this, you can read Sven Birkert’s The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (New York: Faber and Faber, 1994) in print, on the Web, or on your Kindle.
* Computers and digital books similarly stole from the world of print. We type on “desktops” with “folders” and “files” that we can “cut, copy, and paste,” terms borrowed from print culture that helped us conceptualize a new form of writing by comparing it to an older, familiar one. Once we are familiar with the new, the vestiges of the old can be discarded. Printed books eventually abandoned guidelines, for example, and instead of folders we are using the “cloud.”
* There is no logical explanation for the rise of all these different hands; it was a cultural phenomena. To understand, consider how many different website designs or themes are available to someone who wants to set up a site using WordPress. Each one has its own look and its own associations, and when there is no consensus as to how words should look, there is enormous choice. Early in the computer age, people reveled in choosing a different font to best clothe their letters. That has settled down now, as Times New Roman—another “New Roman” script, like Carolingian minuscule and humanist—has become a de facto standard.