Calligraphy after Print: Script, Self, and Society in the Material Renaissance

What did it mean to write – and to write beautifully – in the century after print? Existing scholarship on Renaissance calligraphy has focused on printed manuals, associating them with standardization, codification, and discipline. This article is the first to offer an account centred on use. Drawing on the influential manuals of the Nuremberg calligrapher Johann Neudörffer (1497–1563), alongside manuscript copies, material interventions by owners, and civic and domestic records, it traces the relationship between the Renaissance ‘invention’ of script and the calligraphic imagination it enabled in practice. At the heart of the craft of calligraphy sat the first powerful argument for what scholars today might term a psychology of writing – a special form of meaning in the making of script. Observing both the power of that claim and its instability, this article aims to establish calligraphy, and more importantly calligraphic practice, as a historiographical subject, one which it argues is of critical importance to understanding crucial elements of the early modern: self, subjectivity, and expressiveness on the one hand, and community, codified style, and discipline on the other.