Manuscript Laboratory, Part 2, Early Modern Hands (ca. 1500-1700)

Laboratory Instructions: You and a partner will collaborate to analyze your document.  As you did in the printed book leaf laboratory, describe the document you are assigned as completely as you can.  Follow this link to a worksheet that will help you be methodical about taking notes.   Follow these links to aids in identifying or defining or determining persons, places, things, and actions in your documents, and conversion of currency values into modern equivalents.  This contextual information will help you develop the all-important "global sense" of the what the document means and does for those people and places and things.  Remember the lesson of MS Lab 1--until you knew it was a magazine article about collecting rare books, your leaves were much harder to read!

        Notice what the digital surrogate reveals to you, and notice what you cannot determine from the digital surrogate.  Use the class-meetings devoted to the laboratory to investigate the leaves, themselves, taking great care to subject them to as little stress, moisture, or contamination as possible.  Share your evidence with your fellow researchers in person and using the discussion forumsF.  Create a list of questions you need to research in order to improve your bibliographic description and, for each, a short list or note of resources you will consult to answer the question.  For each class, be ready to explain what you know (so far) and what you don't know but want to find out.

        Each of your documents is unique, but all are of the same general type, as you can tell by comparing them side by side.  What rules were the scribes following for the large-scale appearance of the documents they were producing?  Like a modern book's layout, with certain information on the title page and other information stored at the head or foot of individual pages, these documents have a "geography" or "míse-en-page" which enables their intended readers to decode their contents. What kind of information appears where in the document?  Clicking on any "Reduced Image" hyperlinked to this page will take you to a full-sized image for closer inspection.  Note what you can and cannot detect using the high-quality digital image, and those questions which only could be answered by examining the document, itself.

Manuscript Laboratory 2 Documents: What the Booksellers Say