Tutorial - From Inscriptions to Print: a history of writing and the survival of texts with Dr David Wright

From Inscriptions to Print: a history of writing and the survival of texts

An illustrated journey from Roman capitals to the age of print. Ancient texts were subject to the vagaries of illegibility, fashion, war and deliberate destruction; initially written on long and cumbersome papyrus rolls, they were transferred to the book format as we know from the fourth century. The copying process was slow and fraught with many difficulties, and it is chiefly thanks to the educational reforms of Charlemagne that we have so much today. This revolution on parchment – the world’s most enduring writing material – has ensured the survival of many world classics and at the same time produced artistic masterpieces of the highest complexity and beauty in the form of illuminated manuscripts. The fourteenth-century Italian humanists searched diligently for lost texts and gave the world their new Italic script. In the 1450s the cultural revolution of moveable printing ushered in a new age for information transmission, but how reliable were the manuscripts being committed to print for the first time? Now was born the art of textual criticism which occupied some of the most acute scholarly minds the world has seen. The advent of steel pens in the later 1700s offered some relief to weary scribes, but even in the 21st century the passage from the author’s manuscript [typescript?] to the printed edition is often still far from straightforward – the world will always require diligent proofreaders.

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