Marc Smith Another title for this talk could have been: “A Rendezvous between Palaeography and Type Design”, or Materiality, Creativity and Legibility”. How and why do new scripts emerge? The evolution of writing is often described as styles morphing in a void, not taking into account the technical, cultural or cognitive parameters, in short: the changing balance between the constraints of writing and reading. Shifts in the materials, tools, scale and functions of writing have produced slow-motion revolutions via empirical adaptation by multitudes of scribes but also expert creative decisions at definite points in time. Palaeography has highlighted the importance of processes leading from set, formal scripts to more cursive forms in common writing, and much less the opposite course of formalisation, whereby scribes or stonecutters create formal letterforms out of common writing, through experimental decisions similar to those of a type designer stabilising a font. In response to specific needs, particular trades even created their own remarkable scripts, some of which were hardly legible for outsiders.
Individual experiments in ancient and medieval letter design will be illustrated mainly by focusing on a selection of unusual inscriptions in stone or metal, from expertly crafted lettering, in response to particular material or cultural contexts, to abnormally deformed outcomes. The latter belong to artisans competent in their materials but often less familiar with writing, including some who were clearly illiterate. By relying on a simplified visual/geometric perception of texts handed to them in a common script, and adapted to their materials according to their own ideas of a solemn epigraphic style, they produced some really intriguing letterforms, sometimes almost illegible — thus offering not only exciting cognitive challenges in decipherment but also food for thought about individual creativity (and its limits?) in the development of new scripts.