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French to English translations [PRO] Art/Literary - Art, Arts & Crafts, Painting / illuminated manuscripts
French term or phrase:lettres de forme
"Ces deux manuscrits ont beaucoup de traits communs : même nombre de cahiers, mêmes justification, réglure et mise en page, même écriture en lettres de forme ou libraria gothica formata par la main d’un même copiste"
I have translated "libraria gothica formata" as "Gothic book hand script", for which I have a couple of good sources. I am not sure whether to translate "lettres de forme" simply as "Gothic script".
I hesitate to mention, yet again, that palaeography is NOT my area of expertise.
That being said, it should be clear that all letters on a page --be they hand written or printed from piece of lead-- have, by their very nature, a "form"; and the "form" of each individual manuscript (literally, hand written) letter is made up of multiple strokes of a pen.
The palaeographer's primary tool is the *minute* examination of each and every stroke of the pen which, collectively, determines the "form" of each individual letter.
I don't know what other word one would use to describe the "form" of a hand written letter, and see no reason why that term should only be applied to typography.
Are you saying that, in your extensive experience, the French phrase "lettres de form" is commonly translated by (or understood to mean) "textura"?
When "textura" is (according to Wiki, etc.) in common French usage?
I've done a lot of translation in this field for specialist researchers, and the term I proposed is widely used by them. Letter forms, on the other hand, to me has to do with type and typesetting. I'll leave it to Barbara to choose.
Yes, I see now that "textura" (not the redundant "textura script") is a term used for what, in English, is known as "black letter" --it seems to be a generic term used for virtually any "Gothic" script in use during the High and Late middle ages
It *may* well be that this loose, general and generic term is what B D's author meant by "lettres de forme" --in which case, I suppose that "textura" could be used as a translation.
Perversely, I still prefer my own solution (letter forms, followed by a more precise explanation) --in part because "textura" is so generic and so little used.
Sorry, I didn't see that you had indicated the approximate date and type of mss. we were dealing with.
As a general notion, any sort of ms. can be "illuminated" --though illustrations are very rarely found in charters (documents) or cartularies (collections/copies of charters); those are much more utilitarian instruments.
"Legal texts" --in the sense of texts containing or *on* the law-- are books/codices (as opposed to charters/documents, which are usually written on a single sheet of parchment), written in a "book hand" and very rarely contain any sort of "illumination" other than, perhaps, an "author portrait" at the beginning of the work.
As I read him, what your author is trying to do is make a case for asserting that these two mss. are very likely the work of the same scribe or, at the very least, from the same "scriptorium" --he's not only noting that the palaeography (handwriting) is the same, but also that the basic layout of the books are the same (number of folios, format of the text block on the folio/page, etc.).
Ms. work is, above all, very *meticulous* --at the level of palaeography it can come down to how the individual strokes of individual letters were made.
Manuscripts/palaeography is definitely not my field (and believe me, it is a very, very specialized area of expertise), but I know that there is a distinction made between a "book hand" (i.e., the script which is used to copy books) and a "chancery hand" (that used to execute documents, letters, etc.).
The distinction between the two becomes clear in the course of the later Middle Ages --and I suspect that the ms. which you are dealing with is rather "late" (XIV c. or later?).