What did it mean to write in the Renaissance, and what did writing mean to Renaissance Europeans? In the first half of the sixteenth century, the calligrapher Johann Neudörffer (1497–1563) ventured an answer through three texts: Fundament seinen Schülern (1519), Gute Ordnung (1538) (see Figure 1), and Gesprechbüchlein (1549).Footnote 1 Often invoked for their status as ‘firsts’, this body of work offered an ambitious articulation of a practice in which many of Neudörffer’s Renaissance peers were equally invested, a practice moreover which has long underpinned both the history of Europe and its historiography: the making of script and its creative power as a means of expression.Footnote 2 As Neudörffer’s final text claimed:
there is a great difference between writing beautifully and writing well. For there are those who can make good books and skilful poetry, even if they do not shape their letters beautifully – and so they merely write ‘well’. And it is said, if a man has money, he should write as if he is worth a thousand florins.Footnote 3
Cover page of Gute Ordnung, 1538. Metropolitan Museum of Art copy, hand-tinted with gold, featuring nineteenth-century annotations.
The term Neudörffer used was zierlich Schreibens, ‘intricate’ or ‘graceful’ writing, and he described it as an Erfindung, an ‘invention’.Footnote 4
From the early sixteenth century, a generation of experts published manuals establishing what they termed a ‘new’ craft of writing, and in the process created a kind of celebrity writing master, whose work was collected, treasured, handled, and emulated by individuals and local communities throughout Europe.Footnote 5 Its ubiquity and importance led art historians to describe calligraphy as an intrinsic part of early modern visuality, linked to new techniques of engraving and line-making.Footnote 6 Here, in accordance with Neudörffer’s evocation of wealth and worth, I situate the calligraphic line as a relational practice rather than a visual object, offering a disciplinary reading more attuned to the historical subjects of family, community, identity, and authority. The practices of calligraphy adorned governmental records, influenced chancery administration, and shaped the reception of documentation. They resulted in new bureaucratic and civic professions, highly codified chancery scripts, and new forms of pedagogy.Footnote 7 In households across Europe, calligraphic practices shaped domestic records, revealing familial orders of emotion, materializing kin relations, and structuring generational memory-making. This article considers calligraphy, and more importantly calligraphic practice, as a historiographical subject critical to problematic categories of the early modern: self, subjectivity, and expressiveness on the one hand, and community, codified style, and discipline on the other.
Most importantly, Neudörffer’s claims anticipated what scholars today might term a ‘psychology of writing’.Footnote 8 This long-standing discipline explores the cognitive dimensions of writing, arguing for a ‘special form of thinking – the making of meaning’ inherent in the embodied practice of forming text.Footnote 9 Psychologists suggest the act of writing is central to human processes of creativity, interpretation, and expression.Footnote 10 Neudörffer’s anticipation of precisely these claims, at a familiar moment of technological disruption, political and religious tumult, and expanding global horizons, offers a new relevance of the Renaissance for the present, deepening our understanding of the historical relationship between self and script, as well as script and society.
In contextualizing this argument historiographically, one could posit a spectrum in scholarly attitudes toward early modern writing, ranging from Jacob Burckhardt’s nineteenth-century valorization of a Renaissance self, ‘unveiled’ by new possibilities of authorship, to critical approaches to literacy, print, and the written word by scholars such as Jacques Derrida, Walter Ong, and Tim Ingold in the later twentieth century.Footnote 11 Few historians today would share Burckhardt’s investment in a rational, secular, implicitly male selfhood; nonetheless an assumed connection between writing and interiority undergirds much recent scholarship on the early modern, from the ‘turn’ to ego-documents, to literary work on material texts; studies of funeral sermons and piety; work on marginalized identities; the growing body of literature on early colonial encounters.Footnote 12 This can be set against more critical approaches to print and writing. Since the advent of critical theory, thinkers such as Derrida have scrutinized what they interpreted as a peculiarly modern rigidity of language associated with print culture.Footnote 13 Ong argued that written culture divided exteriority from interiority, while the shift to print changed words from ‘an ongoing event’ to a flat surface.Footnote 14 Ingold opposed writing to embodied knowledge within other forms of ‘line-making’, such as weaving, knotting, or wayfaring.Footnote 15 The same attitude informs the only scholarly monograph on Renaissance writing manuals, Jonathan Goldberg’s Writing matter.Footnote 16 Writing in the 1990s and influenced by Derrida, Goldberg viewed calligraphy as a disciplining tool and the printed writing manual as a technology opposed to the embodied (and natural) hand. His arguments have been largely affirmed by other scholars. In her work on eighteenth-century Britain, Aileen Douglas illuminated the gendered effects of disciplined script, while Tamara Plakins Thornton traced the nineteenth-century role of script in shaping communal identity in a ‘self-constructed America’.Footnote 17 All agree that script operates as a social instrument to shape behaviour, gender, and community, with print as its codifying force, producing stability and uniformity.
I offer a different interpretation of Renaissance calligraphy, not in tension with print but in dialogue with it. The hierarchies of script that emerged amidst rising literacy levels and the commercialization of print reflect familiar models of social discipline.Footnote 18 However, the creative claims of calligraphy enabled new modes of expression that facilitated early modern practices of selfhood, family, and community from the inside out. Sixteenth-century calligraphy offers a practice-based model of self-expression that moves beyond these binaries. Its disciplining power (which I do not disagree existed) lay less in print’s codification than in the affective and creative potential of practice and the emotional value it held for users.
This article insists on a focus on use. It is the first to examine calligraphic practice beyond printed manuals and to situate it across civic and domestic contexts. It surveys the development of calligraphy texts across Europe and their reception in manuscripts from sixteenth-century German cities, central sites of what historians have termed ‘the material Renaissance’.Footnote 19 While its principal case study is mostly (though not exclusively) the traditions of Neudörffer, the aim is not to offer a specific history of Nuremberg, but a thick description of how writing shaped broader forms of community and individuality.
The article is broken into five parts. The first examines the Renaissance ‘invention’ of script, and its creative relationship to print. The second addresses Neudörffer’s ‘calligraphic imagination’. The third traces the ownership and reception of printed manuals. The fourth situates subjectivity in manuscript copies of printed works, and the fifth explores the use and preservation of calligraphy across domestic and civic records.
I
Neudörffer called it an ‘invention’, other calligraphers described it as a ‘new’ method. Yet, although newly defined, calligraphy was not newly practised in the sixteenth century. For this reason, it offers a revealing example of the Renaissance politics of knowledge creation. Vernacular ‘how-to’ treatises have been widely studied for their textual innovations, their claims to expertise grounded in apprenticeship and embodied learning, and the epistemological implications of the codification of such knowledge in print.Footnote 20 Unlike other authors in this genre, however, calligraphers were not guildmembers; they could not offer to reveal secrets or trade on the legibility of a guild status.Footnote 21 Their presentation of writing as a new craft offers a slant on forms of textual authority more commonly associated with the Renaissance, which tended to emphasize tradition, precedent, or antiquity.Footnote 22
The development of written culture in late medieval cities coincided with the rise of professions such as notaries, court recorders, chancery scribes, and diverse roles in book production, including illuminists, typesetters, proofreaders, bookbinders, and booksellers.Footnote 23 In Italy, according to Laurie Nussdorfer, ‘public writing’ emerged in this period as distinct from and more authoritative than ‘private writing’; while in Germany the increasing complexity of the imperial chancery system influenced administration and language alike.Footnote 24 Writing masters or Modists as they were termed in German emerged at the nexus of these developments.Footnote 25
Single-leaf printed and manuscript advertisements for the ‘science of scriptura’, as one scribe in Nantes termed it, date back to the mid-fifteenth century, and can be found from urban centres dotted across French and south-west German-speaking lands.Footnote 26 In Italy, the term maestro de scrivere can be found in early sixteenth-century school records.Footnote 27 Medievalists distinguish modists from scribes for three reasons: their expertise lay in a range of hands rather than clarity in one; they advertised through print, directly engaging with a novel and transformative technology; and in contrast to the ‘humility trope’ associated with medieval scribes they both claimed and gained repute.Footnote 28 Early writing masters were often itinerant, but by the late fifteenth century growing demand allowed many to settle and acquire civic status.Footnote 29
Although the profession was established by the end of the fifteenth century, the passage of calligraphy into print significantly expanded its claims. The earliest surviving manual, Sigismondo Fanti’s De modo scribendi, was published in Venice in 1514.Footnote 30 Drawing on earlier manuscript traditions and Luca Pacioli’s mathematical handbook from 1509, three sections of Fanti’s four-section treatise concerned the mathematical rules for forming perfect letters.Footnote 31 The first, however, dealt with freehand writing, distinguishing between proportion on one hand, and the ability to shape pleasing letters with an unbroken, freehand line on the other. This Fanti termed ‘de modo scribendi’, the way of writing. It was difficult to convey writing through language. Fanti grappled with similes and analogies drawn from human and animal bodies to convey the shapes of letters. It was even more difficult to find visuals. Blank spaces in the published treatise, where specimen samples of script might have appeared, suggest that no woodcutter could be found to produce them.Footnote 32
Neudörffer’s first publication, Fundament (1519), attempted the opposite approach, presenting writing entirely through images. Surviving today in only seven copies, it demonstrated the formation of letters from basic strokes to elaborate Gothic majuscules (capital letters).Footnote 33 Subsequent manuals diversified. In 1522, the Vatican chancery scribe Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi published La operina, which focused particularly on ‘cancelleresca’, or chancery script. Giovanni Antonio Tagliente’s Lo presente libro (1524) contained multiple scripts, including Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic.Footnote 34 Geoffroy Tory’s 1529 Champ Fleury combined a disquisition on the origins of language with a wide range of alphabets, both real and imagined.Footnote 35 The first etched manual, Neudörffer’s Gute Ordnung (1538) achieved a new level of visual refinement.Footnote 36 Its surviving copies vary considerably; they extend the visual argument of Fundament and introduce explicit reflection on the creativity inherent in drawing a line.Footnote 37
Later manuals increasingly emphasized authorship. Giovanni Battista Palatino’s Libro nuovo d’imparare a scrivere (1540), probably the best-known work of the sixteenth century, was also the first to include an author’s portrait.Footnote 38 Juan de Yciar followed suit with a frontispiece that explicitly referenced scribal capacities, depicting angels in possession of calligraphic instruments, including quills, knife, inkwells, compass and book.Footnote 39
From mid-century, the genre proliferated across the Holy Roman Empire. Neudörffer’s final work was published in 1549, the aforementioned Gesprechbüchlein.Footnote 40 Near contemporary manuals by Urban Wyss, Caspar Neff, and Wolfgang Fugger all invoked Neudörffer, reflecting both a growing culture of citation and an emerging collective identity.Footnote 41 Calligraphic communities formed elsewhere too. In the Low Countries, the appearance of works by Clément Perret (1569), who referred to himself as a ‘sculptor literas’, a sculptor of letters, kicked off a flurry of publications.Footnote 42 In England, Peter Bales’s Writing schoolemaster (1590), coined the term ‘calligraphy’, offering ‘a briefe, plaine and certein Method in the Artes of Brachygraphie, Orthographie and Calygraphie’.Footnote 43 By the eighteenth century, at least 800 calligraphy manuals had been published across Europe.Footnote 44
These texts agreed that writing ‘beautifully’ was different to simply writing. Purposefully differentiating themselves from ‘Abc-daria’, which taught the youngest students their letters, calligraphy manuals promised instruction in multiple hands. In doing so, they made a rhetorical claim, a ‘high gloss’, according to Goldberg, that elevated calligraphic mastery above mere legibility.Footnote 45 Scholars including Lee Hendrix and Thea Vignau-Wilberg have described the aestheticization of script at the nexus of courtly display and collections.Footnote 46 While this overview confirms their insights, it is worth lingering on elements outside their analysis: the growth of the craft and persona of the calligrapher, which was as urban and mercantile as it was courtly, and the profound differences among early manuals, which highlight an experimental interplay between hand and print.Footnote 47
The relationship between print and calligraphy is one of its most interesting qualities, both historically and historiographically. Early modernists might not be surprised that calligraphy emerged after the printing press: a generation of scholarship has pointed to the vitality of manuscript culture after print.Footnote 48 But even for those familiar with early modern manuscript culture, aspects of the relationship between calligraphy and print bear remarking. First, in the case of calligraphy, print was not just an affirmation of script, but a spur to innovation. Calligraphers had to innovate ways of communicating practice, a process which was both epistemological (how do I communicate knowledge about writing?) and technological (how do I communicate knowledge about writing in print?). Some manuals revealed limitations, as in the case of Fanti and his missing majuscules. Others displayed innovation: Palatino made creative, visual use of ‘prose poems’; Perret framed his specimens in cartouches; and the early seventeenth century saw the widespread adoption of calligraphic signatures and ornate flourishes.Footnote 49 These were not accidental or superficial byproducts of a developing craft, but difficult-to-achieve technical innovations which indicate deep preoccupation with space, text, and authority.
Susanne Meurer has suggested the turn to etching offered a direct relationship between the pen and the burin, while Amy Namowitz Worthen sees engraving as artifice, in which the unbroken flow of the pen’s ink was rendered using minute and dense crosshatching.Footnote 50 Both technologies complicated the relationship between the pen and the press, offering a visualization of process and an ambivalent commentary on the nature of subjectivity and authorship.Footnote 51
As the century progressed, manuals featured an expanding variety of scripts and increasingly taxonomized them by language, place, or function. These could be local and linguistic, as when Juan de Yciar included ‘aragonesa’, or situational and bureaucratic, as in his ‘letra de privilegios’, or both, as in Neff’s samples of Hungarian varieties on the imperial chancery script.Footnote 52 They reflect the increasing status of the vernacular and remind us that the artefacts of this process were not just manuals, but the scripts themselves.Footnote 53 This raised the question – what made style appropriate?Footnote 54 One answer was that style was a determinant of genre: cancelleresca for chancery documents, italics for personal conversation, gothic majuscules for civic proclamations, roman hands for inscription, and so forth. Another answer was that style was determined by language.Footnote 55 In the nineteenth century, these developments were interpreted in the light of national orthography (for example, Fraktur was seen as the ‘natural’ choice for German, since the vowel sounds of the sharp zet could not be represented in the Roman italic),Footnote 56 but in the Renaissance the question remained open. Rather than any linear development, sixteenth-century calligraphy manuals present sequential moments of reflection and refraction, in which different sets of possibilities for the meaning, value, and legibility of script unfolded.
Sixteenth-century calligraphy resists the dichotomy between image and text, inviting readers to look as well as to read.Footnote 57 This aspect would develop through the sixteenth and into the seventeenth century, through increasingly pictorial and figurative flourishing, micrography, and codicology. At the same time, text remains at the heart of calligraphy – flourishes adorn script, cartouches frame it, micrography makes images with words. In this way, calligraphy manuals invited ‘extra’ interpretation of text, visually injecting the verbal with ambivalence. Nicholas Hudson observed that by the beginning of the sixteenth century the idea was beginning to emerge that writing should be a universal skill, and that clarity should be its ideal.Footnote 58 But Renaissance calligraphy invited readers to problematize clarity, to visually consider the question of legibility itself. With this in mind, we turn to Neudörffer and the urban environment in which he practised.
II
Johann Neudörffer was born in Nuremberg in 1497, the son of a furrier, and died in 1563, an ennobled member of the city’s greater council, an ascent that mirrored his friend, neighbour, and occasional collaborator, the artist Albrecht Dürer.Footnote 59 Neudörffer was married twice, first to Magdalena, a widow ten years his senior.Footnote 60 They had a son, Stephan. A 1527 portrait of the couple bears inscriptions in Neudörffer’s hand.Footnote 61 After Magdalena’s death, Neudörffer married Katharina from Augsburg, with whom he had at least three children, Johann the younger, Gabriel, and Katharina. Johann the younger became a writing master of some renown; his son, Anton, later published a retrospective account of his grandfather’s work.Footnote 62 Traces of their hands survive in a miniature family notebook of calligraphic recipes. As well as painstakingly tracing his children’s connections to his craft, it records techniques for writing in multiple colours and on various surfaces, including ‘metal’ (i.e. etching), marble, and glass.Footnote 63 Material traces of these practices remain on medals and coins inscribed by Neudörffer, one of which was buried underneath the cornerstone of the new fortifications around Nuremberg’s castle in 1538.Footnote 64
As this might suggest, collaboration was important to Neudörffer. He is most often cited for his 1547 manuscript account of Nuremberg’s community of artisans, which offers one of the earliest biographies of Dürer.Footnote 65 It described famous figures such as Wenzel Jamnitzer, Peter Flötner, Veit Stoss, Nikolaus Glockendon, Adam Krafft, and Hans Sachs, and lesser-known but essential members of this community, including Endres Volckamer, a papermaker, Hans Maslitzer, a writing master from whom Neudörffer may have learned his craft, and Hanns Ehemann, an oculist, whose ‘invention’ of glasses was of personal importance to the calligrapher (Neudörffer noted he received his first pair at sixteen).Footnote 66 Neudörffer consistently foregrounded calligraphic skill at the centre of this community, commenting for example on Adam Kraft’s ability to write with his left hand as well as his right, and Hieronymus Formschneider’s ability to scale letter models up and down.Footnote 67 His emphasis on collaboration was borne out by his inscriptions on works by Dürer, Flötner, Jost Amman, and others.Footnote 68
Neudörffer’s prominence in the city was widely recognized by contemporaries. In 1561, Nicholas Neufchâtel painted his portrait for the city (see Figure 2), and as late as 1624 the Thesaurus philo-politicus, a fascinating encyclopaedia of world cities, used Neudörffer’s image, alongside that of Jamnitzer, to emblematize the city’s artistic renown.Footnote 69 Both works emphasize Neudörffer’s mathematical learning, particularly in the field of perspective, an aspect worth drawing out as the final framing element for his calligraphy. Neudörffer styled himself as a Rechenmeister throughout his career.Footnote 70 Neufchâtel’s depiction of the calligrapher surrounded by platonic solids referenced an earlier portrait of Luca Pacioli by Jacobo de’ Barbari, a connection reinforced by the inscription on the painting’s frame, which named him: ‘Johannes Neudorffer, from the republic of Nuremberg, famous throughout Europe for his infinite inventions and his incomparable work in mathematics and ornamental writing.’Footnote 71
Nicholas Neufchâtel, Johannes Neudörffer, from the republic of Nuremberg, famous throughout Europe for his infinite inventions and his incomparable work in mathematics and ornamental writing. Image courtesy of the German National Museum, Nuremberg GM1836.
It is in this context – deeply enmeshed in the most densely populated artisanal community of the Holy Roman Empire, patronized by its governing patriciate, and committed to mathematical practice – that we should interpret Neudörffer’s publications. His first work, Fundament, survives in seven copies, and each is different.Footnote 72 They vary in their number of pages, between four and six, and in layout. Some copies are printed across the page (in oblong orientation, but on a traditional folio-sized ‘leaf’). Others are printed down the page, in vertical format. Some are adorned with illuminated majuscules, some missing majuscules altogether. Rather than a printed book, in the standardized sense we expect today, Fundament can be considered as a set of experiments with printed woodcuts, the material outcomes of which have been preserved in distinct and different examples. A similar instability characterizes Gute Ordnung, Neudörffer’s best-known work, of which at least eighteen copies survive, comprising different numbers of plates, in different orders.Footnote 73
Both together and separately, these works are highly significant in the history of handwriting because rather than providing simple model specimens to copy, as most other contemporary manuals were beginning to do, they offered visual methods for writing as a process, thereby articulating ambitious ideas about what its practice involved.
The ‘fundamentals’, to use Neudörffer’s term, comprised four basic steps: Zerthailung (partitioning) involved dividing the alphabet up into groups, according to the similarity of shapes; Zerstreuung (decomposition) broke each letter down into single strokes; Anhangung (sequence) can be imagined as something akin to harmony, positioning the strokes on the page; the final step was Verwandlung – transformation or metamorphoses, the power of variation.Footnote 74 Neudörffer’s confidence in the explanatory power of calligraphy can be seen in the visual presentation of his text. Fundament relied entirely on the provision of specimens to communicate these lessons. Neudörffer introduced specific terminology in Gute Ordnung, but glossed it visually rather than verbally. Form and meaning operated symbiotically in Neudörffer’s work, not simply as adornment or decoration.
Susanne Meurer has linked Gute Ordnung to broader developments in engraving, while I have previously argued that Neudörffer’s principle of Verwandlung offered a theory of copying as a creative act.Footnote 75 The psychological dimensions of Neudörffer’s writing, however, are most evident in his treatment of an even more fundamental unit of calligraphic practice: the drawing of point and line as the basic elements of writing.
The opening plates of Gute Ordnung display samples of points and lines produced by different pens (see Figure 3). Moving from the imagined to the learnable and replicable, they address the idea of order, for which ‘one must have two points, the first a self-conceived or invisible point, and then a visible point’ and the types of points and lines to which they led: a point, a line (short or long), a curve (bent or held), snakes, snails, branching, braided, trussed, a craning line, half a circle, a whole circle, a lengthened or stretched circle, a compressed circle.Footnote 76 As Caroline Fowler has shown, the point and line were central to early modern German claims about disegno in which mastery over the point denoted not just the act of drawing, but the inbuilt capacity to create, or invent the drawing in one’s imagination.Footnote 77 This resonates with Euclidean geometry and the metaphysics of Nicholas Cusa whose work Neudörffer had studied together with Dürer. Like Dürer, Neudörffer treated the point as the imaginative origin from which form unfolds, in his case not pictorially but through visual text.Footnote 78
A plate from Gute Ordnung, 1538, showing points and lines. Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A link between writing and mathematics was not new, but while earlier authors like Fanti and Tory used mathematical grids to construct Roman letterforms, Neudörffer extended an intuitive mathematical reasoning to freehand Gothic and German scripts. These principles were evident in the breaking down of writing to fundamentals on which imaginative versions could subsequently be cast; in his relation of writing to space through the concept of Anhangung; and even through the form of his specimens. Of all Renaissance calligraphers and all copiers of his work, Neudörffer’s specimens are distinguished by their spareness. His blank margins speak to a kind of spatial infinity, in which visual text intervenes but never fully settles. Perhaps the most visually compelling examples were Neudörffer’s ‘pillars’, which appeared in an undated single-leaf woodcut, sometimes compiled and bound with copies of Fundament, and sometimes with Gute Ordnung, combining mathematical projection with the flourishing of freehand majuscules.Footnote 79
Against this expansive conception, the fluid contents of Gute Ordnung make clear that Neudörffer saw creativity not only in each stroke and in the placement of text within space, but in the format of unfolding specimens and the compilation of material texts as well. Although it includes copyable specimens, its instability subverts overt didacticism.Footnote 80 Each surviving copy materializes this unfixity, offering a different visual interpretation. Like the proliferating bodies which populated Dürer’s famous treatise on measurement, Neudörffer’s scripts unfold as iterative possibilities rather than fixed forms, a metaphysical rumination on infinity and presence within it.Footnote 81 Gute Ordnung’s title, less frequently remarked than it deserves, riffs on this: A good order. As composition and material object alike, Gute Ordnung itself was endlessly unfixed, its specimens conceived not as endpoints but as expressions of the creative line.
In sum, for Neudörffer, complexity was not simply an aesthetic attribute of finished script but intrinsic to the process of writing. His interpretation of calligraphy offered potential for self-expression and subjectivity in even the most carefully crafted copies or prosaic specimens. For us, as historians, what does that mean? While the full extent of Neudörffer’s ambitions were not articulated by other practitioners of calligraphy, neither can we discount their potential. Evidence for the creative practices of calligraphy was borne out in ownership of his works, in manuscript copies of his publications, and in personal collections, shaping not just the reception of his work, but a broader culture for calligraphy and its relationship to self, place, and community in the years to come.
III
Research for this article began with a discovery about ownership: annotations on a copy of Neudörffer’s Gute Ordnung, now in the British Library, claimed the book belonged to the family of the sculptor Veit Stoss.Footnote 82 The connection is significant because the relationship between Neudörffer and Stoss plays a key role in one of the seminal texts on early modern art, The limewood sculptors of Renaissance Germany, in which Michael Baxandall glossed his theory of the period by using Neudörffer’s calligraphy to ‘read’ the sculpture of Veit Stoss.Footnote 83 While Baxandall treated the relationship as conceptual, the Stoss family’s ownership of Neudörffer’s book materializes it historically. At least two of Stoss’s sons went on to become calligraphers and produced manuscript copies of Neudörffer’s work; other Stoss samples of calligraphy can be found interspersed in public and private collections.Footnote 84 Veit the younger even gifted a copy of his works to Neudörffer’s grandson.Footnote 85 Calligraphy’s importance to the artistic community was not simply abstract or aesthetic, it was practical, personal, and material.
Ownership is one way of measuring influence for early modern historians. Marks of ownership, records of provenance, and the clustering of existing copies situate the reception of Neudörffer’s works by other writing masters and artisans, patrician and burgher families, learned humanists, and booksellers, printers, and chanceries. Later dispersal, particularly due to the development of nineteenth-century book connoisseurship and antiquarianism, brought Gute Ordnung into the libraries of book collectors in England and North America, sometimes intact, often in fragmentary, disassembled leaves.
The different copies of Gute Ordnung suggest its plates were sold individually and then bound together. Bindings date this to the sixteenth century, although, as we shall see, some copies were clearly altered or rearranged by later hands. Reflecting this, Neudörffer signed many (though not all) of his plates.Footnote 86 I propose we interpret such compilation in the terms offered by Neudörffer himself: assembling these books mirrored the act of copying specimens, drawing from multiple possibilities and variations and imbued with the same creative potential. Here, the Newberry copy is exemplary. At 111 plates, it is the most extensive I have seen. Like all copies of the book, it is catalogued as printed in 1538, although it includes several plates dated as late as 1543, and other plates without a signature or date, which may have been produced even later.Footnote 87 It begins with the foundational etching of points and lines, progresses through twenty-five plates which detail Neudörffer’s method, and eleven plates of alphabets, before coming to specimens. These include biblical psalms, epigrams, and a range of letter forms in different hands, showing writers how to use Kurrentschrift to address a city council, and how to use highly decorated majuscules (what Neudörffer terms the ‘four-broken twisted quadrangle’) when addressing the emperor.Footnote 88 Particularly notable are Neudörffer’s Fraktur columns, dated 1543, often missing from shorter versions of the text, such as the one owned by the Stoss family.Footnote 89 Underscoring its hybridity, the Newberry volume also includes fold-out collections of versals, culminating in eleven leaves of manuscript specimens, albeit with no major adornment or colour.
Marks of ownership are common. The Newberry copy was owned by the Buchner family, who renamed it ‘Peter Buchner’s Kunstbuch’ and inserted an illuminated manuscript cover page with their crest dated to 1548 and a second page featuring an unusual emblematic insignia. Other owners inscribed their names, demonstrated their skill, or added specimens. Katharina Pilgramin, who owned a manuscript copy of Gute Ordnung, styled her own name ahead of its title page.Footnote 90 In a remark dated to 1570, an unnamed owner noted on the reverse side of one title page ‘This is written with the left hand.’Footnote 91 Marginal annotations on calligraphy manuals are rare, but many copies inserted spare leaves on which readers illuminated letters or practised strokes.
Altered by the subjectivity of the reader as well as the author, compilation is one way to consider Neudörffer’s ideas in practice. Collage is another, and here a substantial album dedicated to collections of calligraphy comes to the fore. Assembled by the family of the well-known humanist and former city-secretary, Christoph Scheurl (1481–1542) and handsomely bound in dark leather, with a large impression of the family crest, the first page of the album comprised a posthumous engraving of Neudörffer by Jost Amman. This was followed by Fundament, a copy of the manual by Urban Wyss, a later manual by Jacob Jacobell of Neumarkt, Christoph Stimmer’s Fundament, and a series of single-sheet woodcuts of majuscules.Footnote 92 The configuration of these works testifies to careful domestic activity, the specimens disassembled and then reassembled, pasted page by page, with the messiness of that process still apparent. Fundament for example appears not in its original vertical orientation but chopped up over a series of pages.
As Juliet Fleming has shown, the Renaissance constituted a moment for collage: ‘the cutting and pasting of heterogeneous paper fragments onto an underlying support…was always central to the production and reproduction of Renaissance culture’.Footnote 93 Susan Dackerman, Peter Parshall, and Suzanne Karr Schmidt have shown how embodied interaction with early printed texts changed both print and handler.Footnote 94 In the mode of assembly, cutting and gluing each page onto another page, the owner of these texts remains physically present on the page. Scheurl’s album presents a material counterpart to Neudörffer’s method – partitioned, decomposed, placed in sequence, and copied back into manuals, in an act of Verwandlung. Its instability remains visible, tactile, and material in the long pages which unfold in brittle fashion, sitting at awkward and fragile angles. The album suggests the genre of writing manual was part of a broader calligraphic culture, in which the creative investment of consumers and copiers was as important as the claims of authors such as Neudörffer.
Scheurl’s volume links calligraphy to civic humanism and its associated ideas of eloquence, rhetoric, and governance.Footnote 95 Extended by later family members, his album also traces a domestic and generational engagement with calligraphy. The participatory mode of assembling the text hints at gendered dynamics to the practice of calligraphy – the visibility of male experts and male consumers, and the relative invisibility but close proximity of the women in such families.
While perhaps rare, and certainly understudied, Scheurl’s album was by no means unique. A family album catalogued as belonging to the physician Michael Rötenbeck contains another copy of Fundament.Footnote 96 A further copy of Fundament survives in another unknown family’s album, along with pages from Gute Ordnung, Gesprechbüchlein, and several anonymous, large-scale, single-leaf posters of prayers, alphabets, and Roman inscriptions, folded into the margins.Footnote 97 Other manuals contained manuscript copies of similar texts, or individual pages, bought separately or taken from other works. Not all were large scale. An album of unknown provenance, acquired in the seventeenth century by the Hertel family, contains pasted-in alphabets of different variations, followed by thirty folios of handwritten specimens, in different hands, including ‘Halbes Cantzleyschrift’, ‘Brochen geschoben Cantzley’, and ‘Italianische Cantzleyscher Tittel’.Footnote 98 Other rare, printed calligraphy manuals survive in similar fashion, as for example a copy of Clément Perrault’s Exercitatio, which was cut and pasted into a Dutch calligraphy album in 1618.Footnote 99
Such household compilations demonstrate the vitality of printed calligraphy manuals and the degree to which taxonomies of script formed part of the vernacular currency of knowledge and skill in patrician and burgher households. The hybrid nature of these sources and the manner of their preservation remind us that writing was not simply about producing text but interacting with it. As artefacts, they complicate later assumptions by Derrida, Ong, and others that print stripped writing of deeper meaning. Writing beautifully involved reading, cutting, and compiling, and the visual components it conveyed expressed something more than the pragmatic ideas of legibility as a simple one-to-one communication, or a literal sense of text and objective meaning.
IV
To extend this argument, consider calligraphic copies: a genre of manuscript inspired by print that demonstrates how the discipline of the printed text, when vivified in practice, gave rise to subjective, expressive, and creative art. Relatively ephemeral and scantily catalogued, manuscript copies of Gute Ordnung survive in libraries and archives across Germany, and in major bibliophilic collections in the United States. They invert the process evident in the hybridized printed versions of Neudörffer’s work. In printed copies, content remained fixed, while the ordering, integrity, or placement of printed leaves materialized personal interpretation. Manuscript copies, by contrast, more often cleaved closely to form, with variation emerging through content, levels, and styles of adornment. Their matching of script to specimen testified to the chimerical nature of copying, and to the endlessly adaptable form of the apparently serial, formulaic source material.
An especially embodied example is provided by Neudörffer’s son, Johann the younger (1543–81), who produced at least twelve manuscript versions of his father’s work across his career. The earliest dated to 1558 when he was fifteen and was written on parchment, ten leaves long. It was fronted by an elaborate title page and contained writing on both sides of most inner leaves (see Figures 4 and 5).Footnote 100 Although its title suggests it was a direct copy of his father’s work, it differed markedly from printed versions of Gute Ordnung. Of the eighteen pages of writing, six present alphabets and stroke breakdowns – some closer to Fundament than Gute Ordnung – while the remainder are formularies.Footnote 101 Although passages resemble those in Gute Ordnung, wording, script choice, majuscules, ornamentation, flourishing, and colour all differ.Footnote 102 Later copies by Neudörffer the younger vary further in content and ornament. An ostentatious example from 1567 includes etched leaves of black and burgundy papers, inscribed with silver and gold, while a version from 1579 is relatively workaday: eight leaves written double-sided, its gold limning minimal and faded (see Figures 4 and 5).Footnote 103
A copy of Gute Ordnung by Johann Neudörffer the younger at the age of fifteen, now in the German National Museum and another copy by Neudörffer the younger in the Newberry Library, dated to 1567.
Figures 4 and 5 Long description
This is a formal calligraphy manuscript page featuring ornate lettering and flourishes. The text is handwritten in cursive with large decorative initials and gold ink on a dark background. The layout includes a large decorative heading at the top, followed by paragraphs below. The text appears to be a formal dedication or announcement. Visible phrases include ′Je m′en sers que de luy pour vous dire,′ and ′Toute l′enseignement.′ Some letters are unclear due to the intricate design and ink style.
I have traced extant manuscript interpretations of the older and younger Neudörffer by other writing masters, and more rarely by merchants and patricians in Bamberg, Vienna, Augsburg, and other major cities of the Holy Roman Empire. Identifying such manuscripts is difficult, as catalogues rarely label them as copies and authorship often goes unrecorded.Footnote 104 Nonetheless clues appear within the specimens themselves. The version of Gute Ordnung in the British Library attributed to Veit Stoss includes specimens by Franz Joachim Brechtl, who also produced a manuscript copy of Gute Ordnung, now in Bamberg.Footnote 105 The Newberry Library holds variants of Gute Ordnung by one Stephen Brechtl, owned by Katharina PilgraminFootnote 106 and by Adam Strobel, another Nuremberg Rechenmeister, which bears an illuminated title page with family crests and the name of Hainrich Thenn.Footnote 107 The authors of two further copies of Gute Ordnung in Nuremberg identify themselves within specimens: a version by Nicolaus Werner from 1551, and a version by Sebald Winckler from 1587.Footnote 108 Werner was also responsible for an illuminated prayer book now in the Newberry Library.Footnote 109 Such copies frequently reference other calligraphic practitioners as colleagues, teachers, and collaborators within their pages.
Colour and limning were common ways to enhance meaning within these manuscripts. Many manuscripts include specimens in red, green, and gold. These suggest some conventional or symbolic associations: red in formularies for civic addresses, gold for imperial petitions.Footnote 110 Franz Joachim Brechtl’s Bamberg version contains ostentatious amounts of gold flourishing.Footnote 111 In a twenty-one-folio manuscript attributed to Hanns Jacob Lupin von Memmingen, dated to 1588, biblical proverbs drew particular artistic attention, picked out in letters of blue, green, and gold.Footnote 112
Almost all such manuscripts were written on vellum, which textured surface caught the edge of the pen with far greater precision than paper (although it was not uncommon to bind paper within printed calligraphy manuals, or to use paper in composite writing books, as waste-paper, in children’s books, or in other such instances). Vellum indicated value, signifying differences between presentation books where vellum sample sheets were pasted onto paper, and those where the calligraphy samples were written directly onto the vellum page. The majority were written only on one side of the leaf, but even some of the most intricately drawn versions occasionally used both sides, as was the case with an otherwise ornate text by the patrician Christoph Schürstab, evidence perhaps that the manual was not to be presented but kept privately. Schürstab’s text is unusual for its repetition of Neudörffer’s method over a sequence limned in gold, suggesting an explicit value attached to these technical foundations.Footnote 113
These calligraphic artefacts served different functions including advertisements to potential patrons, ‘masterworks’ marking the completion of study, or personal records of memorialization or contemplation. Together, they reveal a latent network of experts at a moment where such expertise was still very new. Their differences illustrate the spectrum of calligraphic work a successful modist could undertake and suggest an elite profile of consumers across a range of urban, imperial, and chancery contexts. Through them we encounter specific moments where the interaction between calligraphy and reader produced diverse forms, leaving traces of individual choice that gesture to the interiority of reader as well as writer.
Basing my analysis on the version by Christoph Schurstab, I have previously argued that close attention to Neudörffer’s principle of Verwandlung provides evidence that copies of calligraphy, and perhaps copies more generally, should be seen as creative acts. A closer reading of a wider array of copies suggests jettisoning the strictures of copying altogether. Considering such works as ‘versions’ of Gute Ordnung moves us closer to the capacity of calligraphy as a form of reinscribing and remaking meaning. The authors of these calligraphy manuscripts may have seen themselves as imitating Neudörffer, or as repurposing his work: we cannot know exactly. But their work remade his own and should be seen as creative acts of authorship, providing a corrective to an idea of reception as a watered-down form of processing ideas.
V
Having explored individual and domestic practices of calligraphy through copying, cutting, and collecting, we can consider how urban communities engaged with calligraphy more broadly. This relies on even more ephemeral sources, often catalogued in ways that obscure their contents. One example is a modest notebook, described by the Germanisches National Museum as a ‘house book’.Footnote 114 Wider and shorter than the average quarto, it contains household accounts, psalms, and short, commonplace entries. At the end are calligraphic specimens, dated 1532 and painstakingly rendered by the eleven-year-old Paul Behaim. Although juvenile – the scratchiness of the pen, the way the ink has caught and dragged on the page, and the lack of symmetry in the letter formations remain visible – the exercises showcase an ambitious blend of letter styles, from Roman majuscules, to a slightly shaky high gothic, a line in Cantzleyschrift, and short passages in the increasingly standardized Kurrentschrift (see Figure 6).Footnote 115 Some thirty years later, Paul Behaim’s child showed similar ambitions. By the age of eight, Paul Behaim the younger could produce a more polished hand, and a greater variety of scripts, which were preserved, in turn, in a notebook dedicated to that purpose (see Figure 7).Footnote 116 Together, these two specimens, and the passage between them, demonstrate how sixteenth-century patrician children were taught to create aesthetic and materially valuable records. They also suggest the importance of domestic recordkeeping and preservation within this calligraphic turn.
Paul Behaim the elder’s writing sample. GNM HS 97722/174, fo. 84v.
Paul Behaim the younger’s writing sample. GNM HS 14899/99, fo. 3r.
For an eight-year-old patrician boy, such writing was part of an initiation into a culture associated with the most prominent and powerful group of people, not only in Nuremberg, but across the Holy Roman Empire. Evidence for formal tutoring links calligraphy particularly to men, and in contrast to the kinds of samplers and writing exercises occasionally visible in the seventeenth century, in which girls’ writing is poignantly present, for the sixteenth century surviving examples are almost exclusively male. Patrician boys commonly undertook intense periods of training with writing masters, often as the culmination to their civic education. Paul Behaim’s father recorded his son’s instruction: lessons with the schoolmaster Johannes Bey in 1562; twice-weekly lessons with the writing master Johannes Seufridt in 1567; and finally, in 1571, eighteen weeks with Johannes Neudörffer the younger, whom he saw every day of the week, for two hours a day, before he was sent to Leipzig University, in 1572. He was fourteen years old.Footnote 117 Similar patterns appear in the Tucher family, where writing skill was monitored, criticized, and rewarded. Hieronymus Tucher (1502–46) was fifteen when he wrote from his apprenticeship in Lyon in 1517, to tell his grandfather, Anton Tucher (II) ‘I’m now learning to make letters.’Footnote 118 Tucher’s grandfather was a harsh critic, who scolded his grandson for his failure to progress and discontinued his tutorship.Footnote 119 His younger grandson fared better. After his letters were deemed satisfactory, Anton (1510–69) was sent to a French writing master: ‘from whom he must copy all manner of receipts and letters’.Footnote 120 Christoph Schurstab’s manuscript copy of Gute Ordnung, and Christoph Scheurl’s calligraphy album, considered in previous sections, are two further examples of investment in the craft by patrician Nuremberg men. Given that only thirty-two families could claim patrician status, a high proportion created and preserved such works; I have little doubt that further study would yield more.
Calligraphy appears in ephemera, memorial records, and even household account-books, such as the anonymous sixteenth-century manuscript pictured here adorning its sums with ornate majuscules, flourishing, and coloured inks similar to Neudörffer’s published versals (see Figure 8).Footnote 121 We can read into this Neudörffer’s connection between mathematics and calligraphy, or we can see it as incidental. Either way, the embellishment plays with standard form, insisting on individuality within serialized accounts. It speaks to the distinctiveness of household finances, to their value and worth at the centre of family life, and imbues the financial record with temporality, transforming fleeting transactions into objects intended for future viewing and preservation.
Household accounts with calligraphic ornamentation. Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg, Nor 595, fo. 9r.
Calligraphy was integral, helping families and the urban landscapes around them not only to identify, but increasingly to express a sense of place, space, and community. Ephemera from the Hertel collection in Nuremberg offer at least thirty-six single-leaf micrographic illustrations from scribes, institutions, and families produced between the late sixteenth and into the seventeenth century. Notable among them is the ‘Venus Pudica’ a large-scale nude in gold, Latin ‘micrography’, likely commissioned as a private treasure, similar to better-known calligraphic wonders in imperial collections.Footnote 122 Such objects demanded intimacy and close viewing, anticipating modes of visualization and appreciation more commonly associated with later time periods.Footnote 123 Similar dynamics appear in tables, portraits, and even marketing materials. Take for example a 1575 table for the calculation of time, signed by Andreas Gudelfigner, ‘Rechenmeister’ in Nuremberg, which creates an ornamental treasure out of a vitally important mercantile paper tool.Footnote 124 Micrographic portraits survive for Luther (though I suspect from a later date) and Christoph Fuerer, a local notable.Footnote 125 An advertisement for the apothecary in the Neue Spital (New Hospital) from 1610, suggests that some calligraphic specimens were destined for public consumption or display (see Figure 9). Like architectural inscriptions, these works mediate between family and community, whether reaching in as a form of memorialization (as in the case of Luther) or extending outwards, to shape perceptions of commerce or institution (for example, apothecarial displays). Echoing the attentiveness encouraged by calligraphy manuals, they position qualities of intimacy, intricacy, and individual interpretation within the local environment.
An advertisement for the services of ‘Georgio’, apothecary at the New Hospital. StadtB N, Fragm.lat 6.
Calligraphy offers a paradigm for thinking about the project of family, as a set of relationships and knowledge practices grounded in forms of creativity and memory. Scholarship by Claudia Swan and Walter Melion has shown how early modern artists and printmakers combined ornament, text, and recordkeeping in domestic and commercial contexts.Footnote 126 Work on early print culture has likewise affirmed the ways in which the hands-on reception of books materialized social relations in the home.Footnote 127 Calligraphy links reception and production within this broader culture. Families and communities were made not only by the literary writing of memoirs, family histories or ego-documents, but by a far more multifaceted process of producing and collecting records, which in turn involved the hybridity of pictorial forms with text.
I want to consider the fact that such records survive. I have noted the trickiness of tracing copies, printed remains of calligraphy manuals which survive only in fragmentary form, and manuscript copies of calligraphy manuals most often described as ‘writing samples’ in library records. Domestic records of calligraphy, as we can begin to see, are even harder to find, described, if they are described at all, as house books, accounts, or simply ephemera. Nonetheless, these records were preserved. The survival of such fragmentary forms, designed to be handled and used, despite their handling and use, is, I believe, not a coincidence, but testifies to contemporary recordkeeping practices and family archiving.Footnote 128 Attention to writing was itself a matter of record. The correlation between attention to writing skills and patrician family life draws together trends that historians tend to view separately: the emergence of new genres and practices for the expression of interiority, creativity, and self-expression on the one hand, and the emergence of disciplined forms of civic and communal place-making on the other. Attending to calligraphy restores to such documents and records the complexity of variance, the liminality of practice, and richness of ambiguity. Copying and calligraphy link household records to political records, emphasize the embodied materiality of such texts, and by filling in the self-consciousness of the practice, provide a way to mediate between expressions of interiority and codifications of community.
VI
I hope this article has convincingly shown that calligraphy was important to the Renaissance and the Renaissance was likewise important to the longer history of handwriting. If we accept the claims of writing masters, not as true but simply as existing, then as both a printed corpus and a deeply embodied, material set of practices, Renaissance calligraphy helps us understand versions of early modern selfhood as inhabited and formed through careful practice. This is not to deny the disciplining function of calligraphy: etiquette and behaviour was already a feature of English manuals in the seventeenth century, and even in the sixteenth, writers openly espoused the value of the disciplined hand. Yet equating social with artistic discipline is misguided. As Alex Marr and others have shown, Renaissance creativity was never juxtaposed to copying, practice, or control.Footnote 129 Writing manuals emphasized variability, expressiveness, imagination, and process, attributes borne out in practice: sixteenth-century scripts remained fluid, subject to innovation, and responsive to fashion.Footnote 130 Calligraphy enabled new relationships between readers, text, and makers of script. At its edges, Renaissance calligraphy even offered the means to resist text’s legibility, inviting ambivalence and blurring the boundaries between impression and interpretation. The calligraphic imagination opened out to agency and subjectivity, facilitated by self-expression, ornamentation, and connected, rather than opposed, to practice, training, and discipline. Such works are representative of other early modern texts, reminding us to linger with the interpretive richness of Renaissance ambivalence.
If calligraphy helps us understand Renaissance selfhood, however, that does not mean it tells us something essential about selfhood; rather, it locates the conceptual connection between writing and selfhood in a historically specific context. Psychologists of writing fret about the turn to the digital, worrying about what this disruption of media might do to ways of thinking that are ‘fundamental’ to being human.Footnote 131 But the claims of the role of writing to shaping selfhood emerged out of the birth of print, expressed by means of its new, technological disruptions, in dialogue with its uncertain developments. While I believe that they resonated with broad swathes of people – which is why script and calligraphy developed an affective appeal to so many in different ways – the Renaissance ‘invention’ of calligraphy was nonetheless merely a set of claims, assertions made by a relatively small group of experts to shore up a new kind of expertise. Understanding both the fictive nature of these claims and their very real connections to the moment of the Renaissance allows us to disaggregate the work of calligraphy from its broader, if blurrier, implications.
My aim here is to observe both the origin of such a fixed connection between selfhood and writing, and its contingent and temporal instability. Early modern ideas about writing and cognition were not produced out of thin air, but nor were they embedded in some kind of essential European psyche. I hope this can help us to understand not only the importance that writing would ultimately assume in global terms, but the fragility of its inception as a European practice. In considering such connections, we can think with the lessons Neudörffer provided. Like writing specimens, even if phenomena appear similar they can be generated by processes and practices which are deeply specific, tied to imagination and individuality, but also to strategic and social forces. To understand similarities, but also to apprehend change, we must de-essentialize the present to see the contingency and creativity, sometimes anarchic, other times deeply strategic, out of which its developments emerged.
To return to Gute Ordnung, we can consider the cover page of one copy now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which illustrated the opening of this article (see Figure 1).Footnote 132 It is at once unprepossessing (hence, perhaps, its replacement by families like Peter Buchner’s) and remarkably effective, immediately identifiable and endlessly repeatable. Even on this page, we can see traces of other hands, and their ‘versions’ of Neudörffer’s ideas: the hand-tinted gold, limning the starting majuscule; the library signature, inscribing institutional ownership on a text deemed worthy of collection; and, chronologically between them, although spatially below, a nineteenth-century annotation. ‘Many inconveniences ensure an inconsiderate action’ muses its unknown hand, an aphorism less normative than wryly reflective. The neatly written words are followed by a doodled profile, peering into the future – two small points and a line.
Acknowledgements
Many librarians and archivists facilitated this research, particularly Christina Sauer in the Nuremberg Stadtbibliothek and Jill Gage in the Newberry Library. Bert de Munck, Antonella Romana, and Christine Göttler first encouraged me to think more deeply about Neudörffer’s calligraphy. Colleagues and workshops at Cambridge, Leeds, the Institute for Historical Research, the Bibliographic Society, the University of Antwerp, and Utrecht University have generously offered feedback: special thanks to Julia Crick, Kat Hill, Chris Kissane, Alex Marr, Liz Petcu, Allie Stielau, Róisín Watson, and Evelyn Welch. I am grateful to the peer reviewers whose generous engagement greatly strengthened the piece.
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