University of Virginia Library

SECOND SCRIBE

From his hand are the plant designations in the Medicinal Herb Garden and in the Monks' Vegetable Garden, the tree
designations in the Orchard, and all of the inscriptions associated with the altars in the aisles of the church and in the
towers; furthermore, the additions infra and supra tabulatum in the House for Horses and Oxen, the supra camera et
solarium
in the Abbot's House, as well as the words pausatio procuratoris (over erasure) in the lodging of the Master of the
Hospice for Pilgrims and Paupers. Most of the titles of the second scribe are written in a light brown ink that did not retain
its original freshness as well as did the darker ink used by the main scribe. Of him, Bischoff says:


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"The second scribe, likewise, `writes vertically,' but with relatively short ascenders and a certain trend toward loose but
regular distribution. In the alphabet he employs only the cc-a; the d is always straight. The shaft of the f begins with a
curved upstroke, occasionally even the shaft of the s; g is always open at the bottom. Favorite ligatures are ar (martini),
ect, em, ere, ex, and others; fra (a open), and re. These forms, especially the ligature fra as well as the delicate uniform
ductus of the script are closely related to that late fine style of Alamanic writing, of which the librarian Reginbert of
Reichenau (d. 846) availed himself certainly as one of its last masters"[69]

The dynamics of the interaction of these two scribes, who worked in close cooperation, as well as their relationship to
the high official for whom they performed their task, has been discussed in a previous chapter.[70] For those among our
readers to whom palaeography is a new adventure, we are adding a few remarks about the abbreviations used in the textual
annotations of the Plan.

 
[69]

See Bischoff, op. cit., 69-70.

[70]

See I, 13-14.