Roman Half-Uncial: Layout

This page consists of:

  1. The end of one text;

  2. A title explaining that one work has finished and another is about to begin;

    The abbreviation exp stands for explicit, 'it ends'. A rubric closing a work usually quotes its title: here EPISTULA SANCTI AUGUSTINI DE CURA PRO MORTUIS GERENDA, 'The Letter of Saint Auustine concerning the care that is to be taken for the dead'. Such a rubric is called an explicit.
    The abbreviation incp stands for incipit, 'it begins'. This also states the title of the new work: here EIUSDEM LIBER ENCHIRIDION, 'The Book by the same [author], [entitled] Handbook'. Such a rubric is called an incipit.

  3. A list of chapter headings for the new work.

The page is left-justified.

The three sections are differentiated by layout and script.

  1. The last two lines of the previous text run on normally without breaks between words. There is one punctuation pause after the first word, obliuisci. There is no apparent written punctuation.

  2. The title is distinguished by

  3. The list of chapter headings is left-justified and roughly right-justified.

    Each chapter-heading which is longer than one line is given a hanging indent.

    The numbers of the chapters are also left-justified, in a separate column nearer to the edge of the page.

    at the end of chapter 14, the scribe has conjoined the u and s of the ending in order to right-justify the page.

    Oops!

    The scribe has made a classic mistake: he has missed out one of the chapter headings. Someone, possibly he himself, has then corrected the mistake by writing in the missing title and number in the gap between lines after Chapter 7. Since there is no room to write it in the original script, he has used Cursive Half-Uncial, the usual script used for annotating classical texts.

    He has then made an attempt to straighten out the numbering. Since he uses Roman numerals, he can add an extra I to many of the numbers.

    This was originally VIII, 8. He has added an I to make it 9. This is an acceptable way of expressing 9 in later medieval accounts: 4 was usually written iiii.
    This does not work when he gets to IX, 9, which should really be X, 10. (This suggests that he may not have used VIIII normally.) He has to scrape out the I. Scraping with a penknife or pumice stone was the usual method of erasing mistakes made on parchment.
    With XV he seems to have got back into the swing again: there is no sign in this facsimile of any scraping out of an I between X and V.

    By the time he gets on to XVIIII the number is too long for the layout, and he has to line up the chapter-heading with the hanging indent.

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    © MEG TWYCROSS 1999