When I was young, Psychoanalysis was still a major trend in Psychiatry and Freud's and Young's works were very popular, specially "The interpretation of dreams". As soon as I could I bought myself Freud's works. Among them I found this in one of his correspondence letters:
When I was a young student, the thrive to read the immortal "Don Quixote" in Cervante's original led me to learn, without teacher, the beautiful Spanish language.
Sigmund Freud. Vienna. 7 may, 1923
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Which I thought was pretty cool! And from then on, I strived to read, whenever possible, literary works in their original language. Even when I do not know the language, I still try to get the books, often, if possible, as bilingual editions (original and translated). Over the years I have collected what I consider a lovely library.
Flash forward 35 years. I recently found on a book fair this book, which I found interesting for several reasons. First, it was fac-simile of an ancient manuscript, second, the manuscript was in an attractive round hand, and mostly, I was told it contained in the side comments some of the earliest words in Spanish and Euskera (Vasque). The
glosae (annotations) also seem to contain some words of German origin.
That's what the previous image is. To get a sense of proportion, let me say that the original was in less than quarto (which would roughly correspond to less than A5 nowadays). To further help, I included in the picture two coins of 1 cent of Euro. The first one looked too big, so I added the second one, on its side so you can compare the size of the tiny writing with the thickness of a 1cent Euro coin. The side note that is close to it is slightly larger, but some of the annotated words in the middle of the text are barely as high as the 1 cent coin.
Now, for the book, it is written in Visigothic hand. An insular hand used in Spain until the VIII Century. So, the codex must be earlier than that. I love that script: compared to Gothic, it is round, and (to me) much more graceful, though it has some quirks that make it difficult to identify a few letters. It is, obviously, in Latin. I don't really know its writing date.
But the tiny notes... those seem to have been written when the codex was in the North of Spain in an area under Euskera and Castillian influences, and been added by a monk who wanted to clarify the meaning of some words. Latin had been the language throughout most of the Middle Ages, and the notes were written at a time when some people started to have trouble understanding it due to its evolution to local languages. By most estimates they should be dated somewhere in the X or IX Centuries.
Besides the linguistical aspects, the reason I bring this up, is because it helps get a sense of proportion. These notes were written by someone who didn't know Latin well (if he had, he wouldn't have needed to add the notes), so was not too educated (maybe at the beginning or the middle of his monastic education?). He (no sexism intended, the codex came from a monks' Monastery) must have been making his own ink and quills with somewhat primitive tools out of birds feathers. And have cut a straight point to his nib capable of writing this tiny.
To me, that's amazing. He must have had a really good command of the tools, the craft and the hand. This book has been the reason I decided to recover my Latin --you know, in the old times, Latin was an integral part of secondary education, and further, it was the
Lingua Franca of Medicine (e.g. Anatomy books had the names in Latin and local languages).
I add a second picture of another page, where the Visigothic script can be better appreciated: