What I Do All Day

Ever since I wrote the post a while back about what my job entailed, I wanted to follow it up with another post about my usual work. I look at manuscripts most of the day. I examine their binding and covers since each book looks very different from the next (this website has some neat examples of medieval binding).

One of the first things I do when I sit down with a manuscript I've never seen before is to search for signs of previous owners. I go through every page of the book to see if any owners wrote notes, letters, or ownership marks in the text. The manuscript that I'm working on right now has at least 5 different names throughout the text. Most of the random writing from the manuscripts are from the 16th and 17th century and look like the two examples of handwriting below (click on the image to make it bigger):


The manuscripts I work with are usually made in the 14th and 15th centuries. If someone hasn't figured out what works are in the manuscript, I need to read some of the manuscript and figure out what poem, story, or treatise is there. The manuscripts I look at usually have handwriting that looks like this (click on the image to make it bigger):





Since individual people are writing these manuscripts, each manuscript has a different sort of handwriting. But one can usually tell the time period the manuscript was written in based on looking at the handwriting (kind of like when you can tell someone your grandmother's age wrote a letter because it's in cursive and doesn't look like your own handwriting). It's a lot of fun to try and figure out the handwriting, but my eyes are definitely tired when I get home in the evenings!