These are some photos from the 18th-century registries I was going through today at the archives. Note (as I'm sure you will) the extravagant handwriting.
I thought it was interesting how something as dull and bureaucratic as these state records could still be written with such panache. Of course, you could say it was the standard of good writing at the time, especially important for such documents, and probably not everyone wrote quite like this. But it also got me to thinking about how, in a way, this still left something for the pleasure and expression of the scribes in their work; their job offered them some degree of craft, rather than just being "tasks." Yet another reminder over here to slow down and get some joy out of whatever you're doing.
Thanks for noticing this. I'm always pressing my students and incredulous friends to see that human civilization always has craft at its base. It's why I chose the discipline of architecture as a framework for thinking. In _The Human Condition_, Arendt categorizes the whole human artifice as "Work," as the product of a craftman's hands.
ReplyDeleteI actually watched a workman from Bell install our phone jacks today. What could be more pedestrian? It's easy to forget that globalization is just the foam on top of a vast, slowly swirling ocean of material artifacts, n'est-ce pas? Without legible documents, no bureaucracy is possible; but the necessity of legibility soon overflows into the virtue of elegance of calligraphy.
Nicely put, Jonathan.
ReplyDeleteOne might also suggest that elegance wasn't considered an addition, or overflow, to necessity, but was part of how such documents were meant to support and perpetuate the state whose activity they committed down in ink. This was still a time that built to memorialize the present far into the future; in a way, each word and number in these royal records was a little monument, too, and was approached accordingly.
so elegant!
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