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Early Gothic Proposal: Fact Or Fiction?

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At the time of my first examination of pieces of the manuscript that lay in front of me, not much was known of its origin, age, content or purpose. The task is to retrieve as much information as possible. And as a detective solving a crime, a codicologist solves the riddles of early handwritten books. To have a clearer picture it is feasible to start with a script. Early Gothic features can be noticed: b and a, c and a, b and e are touching (“biting”), the top stroke of e is sloped upwards. Based on studying the letters a conclusion can be made that it is a transition from Caroline to Early Gothic script. This makes a rough estimation of the time of origin possible. While further decoding the text, the identified phrases lead us to “Historia Ecclesiastica” by Hugo van Fleury (6th book, II edition, likely 1110). Based on the writing style and content, the text can be dated to roughly 1110 to 1130.
At the times of the production of this manuscript, the main writing material was parchment. One does not have to be an expert to be able to distinguish between paper and parchment; just by touching and listening to how the material is handled, will give a sufficient clue. However, in this case the identification is more difficult, because there is no book to leaf through. The current fragment is only three small pieces of a page …show more content…

A wide variety of skins was used to make parchment in the period of creation, predominantly calf, sheep and goat. According to Reed, goat skins were preferred to be used as actual manuscript leaves while pigs or hog skin was used for bindings. To recognize the animal origin, one should pay attention to the follicle pattern, fat deposits, veining, natural scars and bruises in certain skins. No such features can be seen in this fragment indicating a better quality and making it hard to tell whether it was vellum or another

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Throughout history, there have been different types of art that has risen to fame. But why and how has it become such a symbol in the world? So today I picked a well-known painting that many people may have seen and heard about, the American Gothic. It was first painted during the Great Depression in the 1930’s by a US artist named Grant Wood. Grant started painting in the late thirties, and studied school in Paris in his twenties.

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