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1 - Women’s handwriting

from Part I - Material matters

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2010

Laura Lunger Knoppers
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
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Summary

The advent of printed writing manuals in England at the end of the sixteenth century transformed the way that children and adults learned to write. Also known as copy-books, these manuals consisted of sets of printed woodcuts or engravings of exemplar alphabets and sentences designed specifically for imitation. Learning was democratized, limited only by the ability to obtain a copy-book and basic writing supplies. Between 1570 and 1700, at least sixty different writing masters published well over 115 separate editions of copy-books (many other editions no longer survive). Jean de Beau Chesne, a French Huguenot emigrant, and John Baildon, an English writing master, compiled the first copy-book for an English audience, A booke containing divers sortes of hands, as well the English as French secretarie with the Italian, Roman, chancelry & court hands (London, 1570). Martin Billingsley's The Pen's Excellencie or the Secretaries Delighte (London, 1618) is the first surviving new copy-book of the seventeenth century. The writing master and engraver extraordinaire Edward Cocker (d. 1675) came on to the scene in 1652 and dominated the copy-book market until 1700. Early modern England was unique among European countries in having numerous scripts in simultaneous usage: secretary, Roman, Italian (italic), various legal scripts and mixed (later formalized into 'round hand' from which our modern cursive is derived).

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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