Choices, Part 1

The beginning of any artwork, any project, involves a number of choices.  Sometimes it's easy: a drawing in a sketchbook needs no more than the book and a pencil (and maybe an eraser).  There the hardest choice is "which pencil?"

This illuminated manuscript I've undertaken has required quite a few more, almost all of them provisional.

The Text.  I chose The Lais of Marie de France, Text and Translation, edited and translated by Claire M. Waters (Broadview Press, 2018), because it includes all the lais, uses only Harley 978 for the text, and has the Old French text and the modern English translation on facing pages.

The Script.  Although I had been practicing textura quadrata, I decided in the interest of both authenticity and legibility to study and imitate the unnamed scribe of Harley 978.  I enlarged a piece of folio 118va until the thick parts of its letters matched the width of my pen (an Osmiroid calligraphy fountain pen from the early 1970s with a B-4 nib)  and started tracing.  Chris made me a slanted writing table with a plexiglass top I could illuminate from below that made both the lettering more comfortable and the tracing clearer.  Also, Canson XL Marker is a smooth, translucent paper that's a joy to write on.

Harley 978, fol. 118v and one of my traced pages

Many pages and days of practice followed before my hand got used to this script.

The Lai.  This book-to-be needs only one, but which one?  The romances of courtly love no longer appeal to my elderly self, which pretty much left Bisclavret, the tale of a werewolf, that enduring popular figure.

From a woodcut c.1475 in the Wellcome Collection, London