“And what about the marginal annotations in a different ink, a different hand, written twenty years later? Does it distinguish between a corrector’s note and a bored apprentice’s doodle?”
By J.L. Rivers
Then she turns off the light. Tomorrow, she will look at a single letter, a single stroke, a single hairline flick of a quill that has been waiting seven centuries for someone to care. And she will care. That is the job. That is the whole, strange, magnificent job. palaeographist
Her current project is a nightmare of beauty: a mid-thirteenth-century cartulary from a dissolved Cistercian abbey in Yorkshire. The script is a late variant of English Protogothic, a transitional hand that is neither here nor there—no longer the round, generous Caroline minuscule of Charlemagne’s renaissance, not yet the spiky, efficient Anglicana that would dominate the later Middle Ages. It is a script in puberty: awkward, ambitious, and riddled with inconsistencies. One scribe, whom Lena has nicknamed “the Hasty Brother,” uses a et ligature that looks like a bent twig. Another, “the Neat Nun” (though there were no nuns at this abbey—a mystery she is chasing), dots her i ’s with a tiny, defiant tick, two centuries before dotting was standard. “And what about the marginal annotations in a