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The elaborate initial O is gilded (very difficult to get that to show up on a digital image without skewing all the colours in the rest of the picture) and adorned with very fine painted decoration. The jungly design which cascades from the initial down the margin is done in very fine and fiddly purple and red penwork, touched up with green wash. This is a colourful and rather free flowing version of the fine penwork used to adorn initials in elegant productions. Other capitals are done in plain red or blue, while in a third layer of the hierarchy, smaller black capitals are touched up with red ink. |
| Book of Hours, later 15th century. From a private collection. Photographs © Dianne Tillotson. | |
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| overview | initial | text | alphabet | abbreviations | exercises | transcript | translation | |
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| Click on each of the above to walk your way through the text. The transcript will appear in a separate window so that you can use it for reference at any time. These exercises are designed to guide you through the text, not test you, so you can cheat as much as you like. | |
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 Script sample for this example |
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Index
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Index
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