Sunday, 4 January 2026

It is so tightly packed, so indistinguishable, so angular, that it makes your brain have a fight with your eyes

No one reads full Gothic script for a visual treat. It is so tightly packed, so indistinguishable, so angular, that it makes your brain have a fight with your eyes. It might look neatly ordered and crisp from a distance, bur once you start trying to read the actual words, it stops being pleasant… Scribes were well aware of how ridiculous this tightly compressed Gothic text looked, and they had a mock sentence that was mainly composed of the letters m, n, u and i [where the letters all run into each other so it is impossible to tell which is which]

S. Charles, The medieval scriptorium (2024), 281,283

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