Читать книгу A Catalogue of Manuscripts Known to Contain Old English Dry-Point Glosses - Dieter Studer-Joho - Страница 16

Two dry-point features that are quite common in Anglo-Saxon MSS are simple “marks” – both interlinear and marginal – and “doodles” – mainly in the margins.dry-pointmarksdry-pointdoodles The broad category of marks can take on various forms (like those of similar marks in ink), such as acute or grave accents added for prosodic purposes or simple crosses, sometimes perhaps serving the same functions as present-day Post-it^® slips, namely marking passages that were of some importance or passages where the reader stopped and wanted to continue his reading later on. It may well be that such marks were entered in dry-point in order to leave the visual appearance of the MS intact, but it may just as well have been the case that the stylus was simply at hand and accordingly the marks were added in dry-point for practical reasons. Such marks in dry-point are often not mentioned in editions and MS catalogues, and their study – and hence our documented knowledge of them – is restricted to individual MSS.1

The other common dry-point element in Anglo-Saxon MSS is “doodles” – often small, sometimes largish drawings, executed in dry-point, most often found in MS margins.London, British LibraryCotton Vitellius A. xix2 They feature all kinds of motifs, sometimes related to the text next to it, sometimes (at least seemingly) unrelated, but – like dry-point glosses – they generally do not show well on photographic facsimiles,3 so their documentation is often restricted to hand-drawn copies.4 Similar to dry-point glosses, dry-point doodles are outshone by ink and colour specimens, which lend themselves more easily to art historians’ interests. Neither dry-point marks nor dry-point doodles feature OE language material; hence, they are not discussed here.