Find Other People’s Work

When researching my manuscript, trying to narrow down where and when it is from makes me feel like a detective. Finding out where to start is always the hard part when starting anything. Where I started was looking at the type of script my manuscript was prominently written in, and seeing if there were any other markers in my manuscript to give me any clues.

My script pointed my in the direction of Northern Gothic which is around 14th century. Then I noticed my rubrication (writing and accents in red) was what I thought was French. Turns out I was on the right track! Then I turned to Google.

I looked up “14th Century French Manuscript” and what popped up shows a similar font to mine which was encouraging. During this time I was slowly transcribing my manuscript and searching phrases of it into Google getting very little results which was discouraging. A lot of the phrases in my manuscript are very common, but not common together in the searches I was producing.

Finally I figured it out with some help. With this mystery finally solved, I started looking up “Spirit of the Hours Manuscript” and the name Otto Ege kept popping up. I then found out about book-breaking and manuscripts thought to have been broken up and sold. I then found https://manuscriptroadtrip.wordpress.com/category/otto-f-ege/

These site is on a journey to discover fragmented manuscripts and looking at the manuscripts they have found, they look really similar to mine. The text and illuminated letters look almost identical, but the decoration and floral design looks completely different. This gave me hope I was on the right track and helped me find others on an interesting journey to unfold the mysteries of medieval manuscripts.