He used a handwriting that was marked by his profession, featuring a number of abbreviations that it took me some time to puzzle out. I'd say this is fairly advanced-level paleography - although I should add that compared to my colleagues who work on things like sixteenth-century French or Scottish witchcraft trials, reading this is absolute child's play. At upper right, we find the heading "Rubarb given wt.
Below the heading we find a list of ingredients supplied to a sick sailor, beginning with the still-familiar "Rx" prescription symbol: "[Prescription] of Bark Peru[viana] Powder lix [59] drams. Of the ingredients of this witches brew, the most familiar to modern readers is probably wormwood, the possibly intoxicating herb which makes absinthe so infamous. There's a good amount of shorthand being used here, of the sort that a doctor or apothecary would use in jotting notes to others in the field.
But in fact this is a fairly easy to read example of how early modern apothecaries wrote - I've seen much, much worse, and there are countless pages of documents which even after five years of training, I'm still unable to read. With practice and patience, though, virtually anything is readable. At any rate, I hope this brief and idiosyncratic overview to reading early modern texts has been helpful, and above all, I hope it spurs some further interest in the fascinating works out there, waiting for readers.
Not everything from the 17th and 18th centuries is as immediately engaging as The School of Venus , but there are a lot of untapped riches out there. Posted by Benjamin Breen. Newer Post Older Post Home. Subscribe to: Post Comments Atom. Buy my book Click the image to order.
Just to point out that the flong-s, the s like an f, is different from an f only in that the right hand side of the centre cross bar is removed. The left hand side of the cross bar is intact. If you read L. Straight-sword moniment. Solved it. I am saying all the non-italic therefore highlighted words in the piece are pushing us to read it as an s.
Shake-fpeare and Nafo have a medial flong-s that is almost identical to the f in Stratford, also highlighted by being non-italic. Stratford, alone, is not referring to people. The author is L. Dig and ges? Nafo is Naso aka Ovid. His great work was Metamorphosis. John Overholt, a curator at Harvard University's Houghton Library, told Live Science that the long s originated in handwriting and was later adopted in typography when printing became widespread in Europe during the Renaissance.
The long s can be traced back to Roman times, when the lowercase s typical took an elongated form in cursive writing in Latin. According to librarians at the New York Academy of Medicine , people were using the long s at the beginning and middle of words by the 12th century. The long s and the more familiar short s represent the same sound, and the rules for using long s versus short s varied over time and place, Overholt said.
Overholt said that while there may have been consistent standards for using the long s, these rules were also a little arbitrary, like the rules that govern capitalization.
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