RE: Scribal penmanship
-JKP- > 29-01-2020, 01:25 AM
You can sometimes get away with things if the letter is very small. In other words, if the upstroke (which is the one to avoid making) is short, you can sometimes get the stroke in without spattering.
Technically, it's cheating, it's tempting fate. The downside is even if you get away with it, loops will often fill in because even if the pen doesn't jitter, to cause the spatter, there will sometimes be a bit of a glob of ink coming from the side of the quill that is incurved (the part that holds the ink).
Also, some strokes that look like they were done in one stroke are sometimes two. It depends how well you can match them up. I've seen calligraphers who can do a perfect circle in two strokes (although this takes skill).
Renegade, I think your observation is correct, some of the "o" shapes do appear to be done in one stroke (although many are done in two, which is partly why some of the "o" shapes are hard to distinguish from "a" shapes). This was not considered good penmanship, but people will try to get away with as much as possible if they are trying to get things done quickly. I don't know if the scribes were trying to do this quickly. The script has more of a laborious look (the spacing is all over the place) rather than a "quick" look, but this might be because they were writing with unfamiliar glyphs or possibly because it is a cipher or some other system of conversion that takes attention away from penmanship.