![]() In her book Handwriting in America: A Cultural History, Tamara Plakins Thornton investigates how our scrivening came to “embody, regulate, and generate notions of the self.” The Romantic celebration of individuality, she explains, coincided with a surge of interest in people’s idiosyncratic script. Over time, as the concept of the individual with his own unique interior life emerged, pencraft began to absorb new meanings. Some courts refused to accept legal documents that were not written in a distinct “court hand”-a grand, sweeping, authoritative scrawl with exaggerated ascenders and descenders. Women of high socioeconomic status were encouraged to cultivate a small, tidy “lady’s hand” for calligraphy-ing in their diaries. Some professions had their own prescribed fonts: The “mercantile” hand transmitted a “free and easy” character, and it was supposed to be fast and clear to help with bookkeeping. During the 1600s, handwriting could convey important information about a person’s background, gender, and occupation. Following the same tradition, 17 th century botanist William Coles claimed that the lily of the valley “ cureth apoplexy by Signature for as that disease is caused by a drooping of humours into the principal ventricles of the brain: so the flowers of this lily hanging on the plants as if they were drops, are of wonderful use herein.” Similarly, penmanship has long been thought to relate to identity in mysterious ways, even as notions of identity itself evolved from the class-based and collective to something more internal. He believed that insides were legible from outsides, if we could only “read” the divine lettering inscribed into each one of God’s works. In 1621, after reporting a dream in which he perceived traces of God’s will in the sensual stuff of creation-in shapes, colors, sounds, and smells-a German shoemaker named Jakob Boehme wrote Signatura Rerum( The Signature of All Things). ![]() ![]() A mormal,or festering boil, might connote spiritual corruption, as it did for the lascivious cook in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. So a lung-shaped flower, such as a pulmonaria, was thought to have powers to treat lung disease. The 16 th century physician Paracelsus is credited for developing the “doctrine of signatures,” which held that observable characteristics of beings in the natural world could shed light on their inner essences. ![]()
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