Bastarda scriptsDescriptions of this script are taken from Bernard Bischoff Latin Palaeography trans. Dáibhi Ó Cróinín and David Ganz, New York. Cambridge University Press. 1990 The gap between cursive and textura was bridged mainly by means of the bastarda scripts, whose name... allows one to say that they combine peculiarities of two genres of script. The best known bastarda is that affected fifteenth-century script styled from the French chancery cursive, mostly inclined slightly towards the right with or without loops, which is written with bold contrasting or hair- and broad-stroked and separately appending shafts of n and m, the last ones, within the word, being mostly fractured and arched slightly inwards. It aquires an elegant prickly character ('Bourgouignonne') throughits pointed descenders, through its forms of t and st, and through small points of e, g, and s. Used mainly for French texts, it becomes the court hand par excellence under Philip the Good and Charles the Bold, but was also much used in France into the sixteenth century. It affects the scripts of England and the Low Countries. Of the two English bastarda, the 'bastarda anglicana', which appears already in the mid-fourteenth century, still retains the two-tiered a up to 1500, while the later 'bastard secretary' comes more under the influence of the French 'lettre batarde'. A Dutch and Lower German bastarda that was also written by the monks of Windesheim and the Brethren of the Common Life, and which was so designated by them, disposed with the loops and is mostly heavier and blunter like the scripts there on the whole; it was created around 1425. The numerous scripts from other regions of Germany that are designated as bastarda in the literature are very diverse, some with, others without loops, some with regular approach - strokes on the shafts, others written to a large extent without lifting the pen.
|
