The substance of Elizabethan dreams: the "secretary hand" (16th-17th centuries)
Abstract
In sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the workaday hand in England was the so-called “secretary hand”. It was a specific type of gothic hand that became very popular throughout Elizabethan and Jacobean era, being used both for books and documents. But “secretary hand” wasn’t the only hand used by Englishmen in that period of history. It existed side by side with the “italic”, a successful and recently arrived script modelled by the Italian humanists, and the multiple forms of “court hands”, a gothic handwriting found on legal documents.
This article aims to provide a historical introduction to the “secretary hand”, including a paleographical analysis of this script as well as transcripts of some plates.
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