The Significance of Script Proportions in the Medieval Swedish Charter Script

Abstract

This article focuses on the extraction, measuring and evaluation of script pro­portions in the medieval Swedish charter script. The methods for the extraction and the measuring are taken from the field of digital image processing, and the material consists of a selection of charters constituting ground truth regarding the identity of the scribe. In these charters, the scribes explicitly state that he (only males in the material) has written with his own hand. The script proportions in this context mean the relative difference between the script elements of medium height, e.g. minims, and high elements such as ascenders and low elements such as descenders. The results show that the scribes are fairly consequent regarding the script proportions. The charters produced by the same scribe in most cases hold a similar value, even though there are incidental outliers. The earliest scribes of the corpus, active in the earlier part of the 14^th century, differ from the later scribes in that they have longer ascenders than the rest. This can be interpreted from a chronological perspective, in that the script may have become more compressed during the later part of the 14^th century. Scribes could also vary the script proportions for codi­cological reasons, if the space demanded that the lines must be placed close to each other. There is also an element of incidental variation, meaning that the scribes actually were not altogether consistent in this respect.