1 - Women’s handwriting

Summary

The advent of printed writing manuals in England at the end of the sixteenth century transformed the way that children and adults learned to write. Also known as copy-books, these manuals consisted of sets of printed woodcuts or engravings of exemplar alphabets and sentences designed specifically for imitation. Learning was democratized, limited only by the ability to obtain a copy-book and basic writing supplies. Between 1570 and 1700, at least sixty different writing masters published well over 115 separate editions of copy-books (many other editions no longer survive). Jean de Beau Chesne, a French Huguenot emigrant, and John Baildon, an English writing master, compiled the first copy-book for an English audience, A booke containing divers sortes of hands, as well the English as French secretarie with the Italian, Roman, chancelry & court hands (London, 1570). Martin Billingsley's The Pen's Excellencie or the Secretaries Delighte (London, 1618) is the first surviving new copy-book of the seventeenth century. The writing master and engraver extraordinaire Edward Cocker (d. 1675) came on to the scene in 1652 and dominated the copy-book market until 1700. Early modern England was unique among European countries in having numerous scripts in simultaneous usage: secretary, Roman, Italian (italic), various legal scripts and mixed (later formalized into 'round hand' from which our modern cursive is derived).