In the fifteenth century, religious texts were written in Latin, which was considered by some to be the sacred language. Others saw the use of Latin as a way of using a universal language to unify the Church in the west. The Latin of Christianity adapted elements from Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek and is therefore not comparable to Latin used in ancient Rome [1]. While Latin remained the official language of the church, it was not uncommon for the vernacular to be used intermittently in ceremonies or interchangeably with Latin in a book of hours [2]. This is true for the folios in this case study. The first line introducing the saints in each folio, which is part of the rubric written in red ink, is in French.
The scribes used littera textualis, which is a type of blackletter or gothic script, to write the text in the folios. Littera textualis could be written in two formats: document form, used when writing documents, and bookhand form, used when writing a manuscript like this book of hours [3]. A sort of shorthand method of combining letters or using a single letter to stand for certain words is characteristic of this font. For example, the Latin word et (and) is represented by the letter ‘r’ (fig 1); the strand of letters pro is represented with the letter ‘p’ with a fancy tail (fig 2) [4]. Certain letters would be combined such as the letters ‘c’ and ‘I’ or the letters ‘m’, ‘n’, ‘i’ and ‘u’ in a practice referred to as biting [5]. Other characters were written in the space above a line of text (fig. 3, fig. 4)