Small moment of preening

 My 'tips for scribes' were used in this quarter's TI.
I just got my complimentary copy, plus a TI t-shirt to boot. 
I'm unlikely to ever publish the Great Ex-pat Novel, so I have to take my small victories where I can. 

'I have a book on that' - another small scribing-related pleasure

 Our last revel in Thamesreach was held in the historic town of Ware (formerly home of the Great Bed of Ware, now in the V&A).
We booked Place House, an orignally medieval or Tudor building, much re-used and rebuilt, that is now available for hire. Ware is now a prosperous suburb neighbourhood of London, rather than being a staging town one day's ride out of the city, and it was no harder to reach Ware by train than it is to reach our regular more pedestrian revel site within town. It's a bit smaller than the regular site, but has a lovely garden that we sat in to take in the air after dinner. 

At the revel one of our shire members with an Elizabethan persona had asked to be shown how to sign her name - what would her persona know?

Happily, it's one of the periods where we have a fabulous example - Elizabeth I had a beautiful renaissance hand, and many examples of it survive. So I could actually bring a book about handwriting, an example of Elizabeth's hand, and a calligraphy book with a nice Italic hand to show her how to re-create it - plus pens and ink.

The example of Elizabeth's hand (shown at the recent Lambeth Palace exhibit) is actually a short para she added to a letter of Cecil's, going out to one of her court, explaining she was just getting over the pox, and that soon you'd never know she'd been ill.

Aside from the cool historic detail, it shows beautifully that Cecil had a 'classic' batarde secretary hand (something I associate with the 15th c), and Elizabeth was raised as a modern prince, and taught the newest and coolest italic hand as part of her 'renaissance' education. They couldn't be more different.

The Lisle Letters, a book I'm slowly chugging through, also has several examples of correspondence in English, French and Latin between various members of the house of Lisle and their staff. They're practically illegible except to the practiced eye. 

It's a small thing, but it was very satisfying to be able to say, 'well, I probably have a book about that', and know that I could give a reasonably complete answer.