Jenny Weston (Leiden University; NL)

Chair: Professor Thom Mertens (University of Antwerp)

Lecture: The Great Divide: Paragraphs and Paragraph Marks in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries.

THE ELEVENTH AND TWELFTH CENTURIES represent an age of transition in which the book moves away from Carolingian standard towards a new book format (commonly known as the "Gothic book"). This paper focuses
on one particular aspect of the evolving manuscript, namely the way in which the texts were divided up into smaller segments -- or para graphs. It will introduce and examine a selection of markers that were used by scribes to create such segments, including extra space between the lines,
coloured initials, rubrics, different forms and sizes of script, as well as various symbols and notations. This paper addresses both the physical presentation of paragraph marks and their possible functions. Ultimately this paper will consider how the paragraph augmented the legibility of
the text.

JENNY WESTON is a junior researcher in the NWO-funded project, "Turning Over a New Leaf: Manuscript Innovation in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance", directed by Dr Erik Kwakkel at Leiden University. She currently studies changing patterns of readership in Norman monastic houses of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Jenny Weston
• Paragraph Marks