A paleography adventure in a delightfully human autograph manuscript

Gentle readers, it’s been a while since I wrote. I keep starting to, but to write about new armor lady pictures I’ve found I need to think of something to say about them, so I need to know when and where they’re all from, and somehow I never write down all the information I need on the first try, and then somehow the weekend is over again and while I have glorious heaps of downloaded pictures and manuscript scans and maybe they’re tagged correctly, I still haven’t written anything.

So… Let’s do something different. Let’s go on a paleography adventure! Come with me while I explore some old handwriting.

Most of the manuscripts I look at are not first drafts. I usually read books that were made by commission or for sale, though not all of them were finished. The handwriting is consistent and even and intentional, whether or not I can read it easily. They have few if any corrections (by the writer’s hand or any other), and sadly only rarely have marginal notes.

In my ongoing translation project, we’ve been looking at terminology consistency, things like how many words are used for a particular concept in Latin and how many in German. It occurred to me that in order to create a new translation with consistent terminology, the translator would need to work through the whole text once to find out what all the concepts are, and then choose consistent terms to use, and then go back and re-work it to put all of the terms in the right places. It should’ve been obvious, since the manuscript we’re working from doesn’t have corrections, but I had never thought about the existence of a translation draft.

What would that look like? Would it have as many extra notes and corrections as my drafts do? I may never know about this exact text, but I have hope that someday I’ll know more about what tools and steps were involved in creating new translations in the 16th century. And maybe somewhere, some library or museum has a gloriously messy translation notebook from someone who was working German to Latin.