Western Calligraphy: The Southern Gothic Alphabet

Video Transcript

"(Demo in making letters) Remember we talked about the Gothics. So I just want to refresh your memory. Here we are working on what I would call the Southern Gothic. This is a very generic, very generic look. So what you want, remember now I said that you're going to have, you're going to have every single scribe having their own hand, so there's no way to pinpoint it the way there is to pinpoint type. So, what are the characteristics here? One of the characteristics of the Gothic, remember it's often called black letter, it's the density of it, the verticality, the over-all look. Do you know what I have for you? Is an actual sample of a, this is a page from an antiphonary, a manuscript. An antiphonary is a song book. So this is much larger than most of the illuminated manuscripts that I might turn you on to, but, this, I mean I don't have the exact date but this has got to be somewhere in the 1400's, let's say early 1400's."