Bastard Hands: Fifteenth-Century Scripts and the Processes of Medieval Making

This article focuses on the term “bastard,” an example of the figurative language medieval scribes used to label and think about script. Exploring the use of this jarring pejorative to describe handwriting, I argue that the terminologies medieval scribes used were embedded in the broader medieval cultures of making and craftsmanship. I examine different medieval commodities that were adapted for more versatile use that were likewise termed “bastard,” including swords, saddles, wine, and food recipes; all these objects received the “bastard” epithet because of the ways they were made, rather than because they were cheapened. This social context reveals that bastard scripts are commodities which exhibit the careful combination of high calligraphic features with low cursive ones to meet particular social needs, such as greater affordability or legibility. From this, I argue that bastard scripts can be read for particular literary effects. In the final part of the article, I analyze the variously rendered bastard scripts of the early manuscripts of John Gower’s Confessio amantis. Ultimately, I find that the different ways scribes bastardized scripts uncover a medieval bastard poetics, aided by the poem’s own bastard combination of high Latin verse with low English couplets. Bastard processes of crafting scripts help enhance reading bastard principles of poetic composition.