Maria Strick was a Dutch writing mistress who published four substantial writing books between 1609 and 1624, all engraved by her husband, Hans, who gave up his trade as a shoemaker to work on his wife’s books. Strick ran a French secular school for girls, first in Delft and later in Rotterdam. Her work, as was typical at the time, emphasized formal and informal Dutch secretary scripts and traditional italic writing. Her books demonstrate a mastery of flourishes and decorated initials. In a handwriting competition of 1620, her italic was judged best.
Calligraphy continued to evolve in the 17th century, and there was increasing emphasis on varieties of cancelleresca. Some writing masters began to call their version of this script italienne bastarde, or bastarde, in recognition of their alteration of this Italian hand. Others simply called it italique or lettera italiana. Regardless of the name, the hand had moved far from its early-16th-century prototypes. For example, at the beginning of the 17th century, writers began to change how the small letters were joined to each other. The bottom of some letters were connected to the top of others (en, for example) by a hairpin turn shape rather than at a sharp angle. Metal engraving was clearly a superior method of reproducing this type of delicate feature, which can be clearly seen in several plates in Les Oeuvres (“Works”), published in Avignon in 1608 by Lucas Materot. He called his style lettre bastarde or lettre Italienne-bastarde, and it would eventually influence 18th-century round hand and 19th-century copperplate. In another significant development, the use of flourishes became more prominent.
In Jan van den Velde’s Spieghel der Schrijfkonste (Rotterdam, 1605; “Mirror of the Art of Writing”), flourishing seems to be as important as the letters themselves. Made with the same pen as the writing and in a single uninterrupted line, the flourishes in Velde’s Spieghel range from variations on spirals and figure-eights to representations of various birds, beasts, and even a ship under sail. The Dutch especially excelled in pen decorations, and few important writing books appear without some form of flourishing for the rest of the century. For example, T’magazin oft’ pac-huys der loffelijcker pennconst (1616; “Stock of the Warehouse of Commendable Penmanship”), produced in Antwerp by David Roelands, includes calligraphic drawings of human and mythical figures, animals, ships, birds, monsters, and ornate initials; the book is more a display of what can be done with such penwork than it is a copybook.
Italian writing masters of the 17th century were soon playing catch-up with the Dutch: in 1619 Tomaso Ruinetti published his Idea del buon scrittore (“Ideal of the Good Writer”) which is more about calligraphic flourishes than about how to be a good writer. In Genoa in 1640, Francesco Pisani produced Tratteggiato da penna (“Drawn by Pen”), certainly the most elaborate writing book printed in 17th-century Italy. Pisani goes beyond the mere presentation of plants or animals to create—solely by means of flourishes—full compositions reminiscent of contemporary Italian drawings and paintings. On one page the roles of letters and flourishes are reversed, and the text forms the frame for a calligraphic drawing of St. George and the dragon. Elsewhere, some plates have only borders, and a blank space in the centre is perhaps meant to be filled in by the reader.
In England Edward Cocker, a prolific writing master, mathematician, and engraver who produced more than two dozen writing books, followed the Dutch and Italian lead in flourishing, but as the century wore on the tide was changing. Apparently fashion passed him by, for in his Pen’s Triumph (1658) Cocker rebuffs those who had criticized his pen decorations (or “knotts” as they were called because they looked as if they were tied-up pieces of string) with this punning verse: Some sordid Sotts
Cry downe rare Knotts
Whose envy makes them currish
But Art shall shine
And Envie pine
And still my Pen shall flourish.
Also in the late 1650s, the French writing master and secretary to the chamber of King Louis XIV, Louis Barbedor, published an expanded version of his Traité de l’art d’escrire (“Treatise on the Art of Writing”), in which he presents only two styles of writing, declaring them to be the only useful hands for government documents: the financière and the italienne bastarde. (Barbedor had been given the task of revising the official government scripts by the king’s minister of finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert.) Barbedor’s instructions for writing the italienne bastarde (which he saw as a near-universal hand for all sorts of nonfinancial documents) are precise: small letters slope 20 degrees to the right, are written with a broad-edged pen held at an angle of 22.5 degrees, and can be derived from the letters i and o. He does away with Cresci’s bulbous serifs on ascenders, either eliminating them entirely or replacing them with a little hook-shaped backstroke to the left of the letter stem. He treats capitals differently, writing them with a narrower flexible pen nib. Although he supplies no rules for forming capital letters, he does give two or three versions for most bastarde capitals, and he demonstrates some freedom in their creation. Flourishes serve their original medieval function of preventing written additions to official documents or correspondence. His flourishes appear above and below the text and at the end of every writing line, and they are made with a pen similar to the one used for capitals. For the most part they appear too heavy for the writing and lack the grace of earlier Dutch and Italian pen decorations.
The works of the late 17th- and early 18th-century English writing masters stand out by their quantity, quality, and influence on modern calligraphy and handwriting. English scribes of the period synthesized the works of 17th-century French and Dutch masters into a style they called round hand. One of the first English copybooks to show this new style is The New A-La-Mode Secretarie (c. 1680) by John Ayres; he identifies “bastard Italians” as “round-hands,” and his alphabets are nearly exact copies of Barbedor’s italienne bastarde. In A Tutor to Penmanship (1697/98), Ayres praises Materot, van den Velde, and Barbedor as great penmen who revived and disseminated the art of writing. Ayres also reminds readers that good handwriting is a source of employment, no matter what the occupation.
English writing masters did not hide their debt to continental masters even as they boasted of their own skills. For example, in The Pen-man’s Paradise (c. 1695) by John Seddon, this couplet appears underneath the author’s portrait: “When you behold this Face you look upon / The Great Materot & Velde all in One.” Seddon also proudly demonstrated flourishes that surround the text, in the manner of Pisani and Ruinetti.
English round hand is often mislabeled as copperplate or Spencerian script; the confusion arises from their similarities. All have a steep letter slope to the right (between 30 and 40 degrees), and they all have capitals with broad downstrokes. However, differences can readily be discerned. Round hand has a relatively wide proportion of width to height in its small letters, and they are joined by steeply angled (40–45 degree) hairlines. The script was written with a quill cut to a narrow point with a small square edge on its tip and a slit long enough to allow a certain amount of flexibility when pressure was applied in making downstrokes. Hairlines were extremely fine. The small o was made in one continuous stroke beginning at the top, moving down the left side in a curved motion and up the right side in a pushed stroke, and the right side of a round hand o, b, or e always shows a slight thickness in the northeast quadrant, reflecting the width of the edge of the nib.