Spelling-Analysis and Ralph Crane: a Preparatory Study of His Life, Spelling, and Scribal Habits

<p>Ralph Crane first came to learned attention in recent years when Sir Walter Greg in 1925 suggested that the transcripts of Fletcher and Massinger's 'Sir John van Olden Barnavelt' and Middleton's 'The Witch' were the same handwriting. Shortly afterwards, Profession F. P. Wilson published an article showing that both these plays were the work of the scribe Ralph Crane, who professed to have had some employment with the King's Company, and who was also the scribe of Fletcher's 'Demetrius and Enanthe', the Lansdown and Malone MSS. of Middleton's 'A Game at Chesse', and several poetical manuscripts. Professor Wilson recounted the sketchy details of Crane's life and examined some featuers of his transcript dwelling, naturally enough, mainly on the features of the dramatic MSS. Much of his work need not be repeated here, especially that on the textual features of the dramatic MSS. and the discussion of the copy from which they might be derived. On certain general points there are necessary reservations to be made in the light of more recent scholarship; fuller discussion of several questionable conclusions will be made in the final chapter.</p>

Spelling-Analysis and Ralph Crane: a Preparatory Study of His Life, Spelling, and Scribal Habits

<p>Ralph Crane first came to learned attention in recent years when Sir Walter Greg in 1925 suggested that the transcripts of Fletcher and Massinger's 'Sir John van Olden Barnavelt' and Middleton's 'The Witch' were the same handwriting. Shortly afterwards, Profession F. P. Wilson published an article showing that both these plays were the work of the scribe Ralph Crane, who professed to have had some employment with the King's Company, and who was also the scribe of Fletcher's 'Demetrius and Enanthe', the Lansdown and Malone MSS. of Middleton's 'A Game at Chesse', and several poetical manuscripts. Professor Wilson recounted the sketchy details of Crane's life and examined some featuers of his transcript dwelling, naturally enough, mainly on the features of the dramatic MSS. Much of his work need not be repeated here, especially that on the textual features of the dramatic MSS. and the discussion of the copy from which they might be derived. On certain general points there are necessary reservations to be made in the light of more recent scholarship; fuller discussion of several questionable conclusions will be made in the final chapter.</p>

Scribal Habits in the Slavonic Manuscripts with Athanasius’ Second Oration against the Arians

This article introduces the readers to the scribal habits/practices in ten Slavonic manuscripts that contain Athanasius’ Second Oration against the Arians. These scribal habits are classified and analyzed according to eleven categories: (1) omissions, (2) additions, (3) substitutions, (4) transpositions, (5) non-sense readings, (6) marginal corrections, (7) marginal notes, (8) deletions, (9) erasures, (10) interlinear corrections, and (11) corrections within the text. The analysis of each manuscript is accompanied with the statistical tables that summarize the collected data according to these eleven categories, and there is a longer summary table in the Appendix. Of the ten manuscripts, two are analyzed in more detail as a way of illustrating how the Orations were copied and read in medieval times, and how theological concerns and local contexts affected the scribe’s interaction with the text.

Writing Practices in El-Lahun Papyri during the Middle Kingdom

El-Lahun papyri have fixed writing systems concerning their form, layout, formulae, orthography, and paleography. Reasons for this are the cultural identity of the scribe, writing practices, scribal habits, and the level of the scribe’s education. In this paper, we discuss the writing practices and scribal habits during the Middle Kingdom in El-Lahun society through the hieratic and the cursive hieroglyphic papyri by studying writing materials, the reuse of papyrus, and traces of palimpsest, layout, traditions of corrections and additions, verse points, blank space, guidelines and borderlines, and check marks.

Script-switching between Hebrew and Arabic Scripts in Documents from the Cairo Genizah

In the multi-lingual world of the Cairo Genizah, Arabic (including Judaeo-Arabic), Hebrew and Aramaic were used in legal documents and letters. Jewish scribes excelled in Hebrew and Arabic penmanship. The mixing of Hebrew and Arabic alphabets in documents by particular writers affords important sociolinguistic insights. This article presents case studies of two Genizah writers, Daniel b. ʿAzaryah (11th century) and Ḥalfon b. Manasse (12th century), who were both highly innovative and exceptional in their use of scripts and vocalisation signs. Their scribal habits and decisions allow us to understand attitudes of writers towards the two scripts, and levels of literacy within the Jewish scriptorium, and provide an important contribution to our understanding of medieval allography and script-switching.