Hands and Scribes

Hand in DigiPal essentially refers to a single specimen of writing contained within a single Item Part. It therefore approximately corresponds to a stint but implies no assumptions about whether or not a given specimen was produced in a single campaign. A Hand is also assumed to have been written in a given Script: although it may include allographs from a different script, it is assumed that a single primary script can be identified.

This leads to two important points: first, that if an Item contains writing in two different Scripts, then this writing corresponds to two different Hands, one for each Script. Second, if two different Item Parts contain writing by the same Scribe then these are still counted as two different Hands, even if the two parts were originally written as a single volume.

A Scribe represents the person who wrote the Hands, i.e. who produced the specimens of writing. In practice the Scribe links different Hands from different Item Parts or Scripts in the same Historical Item, as well as across different Historical items.

Note that a Hand and a Scribe are both associated with a date and place. This is to accommodate the mobility of scribes (e.g. a scribe can be primarily associated with a given location but may have written a particular Hand somewhere else), and also to allow a chronology of a scribe's work during his or her lifetime.

Peter Stokes