Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Pages in good condition. Signed copy. Hardcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> The Irish Hand presents both an anthology and an exemplar of Irish calligraphy over ten centuries. The development of Irish script is central to the whole palaeographical development of Western Europe and our familiar “Roman” letterforms owe a considerable debt to the monastic scribes who wrote out the great books which were the repositories of much of the learning of the middle ages. While the finest formal scripts are generally found in Latin church service books the secular and vernacular Irish manuscripts also contain worthy examples of the same tradition. In Ireland where over the centuries the Anglo-Irish tradition developed parallel to the older Gaelic culture the introduction of printing was almost exclusively a development of the Anglo-Irish society and the scribe as the necessary recorder of its texts served the Gaelic society by the transmission of the indigenous literature of Ireland well into the nineteenth century. The Irish Hand is arranged in two parts. The first part is an anthology of full pages chosen from twenty-six of the most famous Irish manuscripts in fine photographic plates with a commentary which gives an account of the contents and history of each manuscript and notes on the scripts and the scribes. The second part examines the evolution of the Irish hand and as well as detailed specimens of the scripts described in part one has some thirty additional examples which trace the tradition of Irish script to our own time. (SP)