The transcription of manuscripts from the period of The Book of Margery Kempe (i.e. circa 1430) is frequently problematized by their scribes' use of "special characters" and abbreviations for which there may not yet exist standardized typographical character support even among typographical catalogs as expansive as Unicode. Fortunately, working groups of medievalists, font designers, and Web developers, like the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative (MUFI), have worked to develop typographical character support for many of these special characters and abbreviations—recommending them to medivialists as a supplement to Unicode and to the Unicode Consortium for inclusion in its catalog.
To reproduce the many special characters and abbreviations found in The Book of Margery Kempe as faithfully and sytematically as possible, this project supplements its use of Unicode characters with vetted non-Unicode characters found in MUFI's Character Recommendations.
The 1,500+ characters included in the Recommendations are supported by several freely available fonts, including Andron Scriptor Web, which this project, through collaborations with the font's designer and MUFI, embeds in its online transcriptions of The Book of Margery Kempe.
The remainder of this page was rendered using the embedded Andron Scriptor Web font and a combination of Unicode and MUFI characters. To see what this page would look like without the embedded font, click the off button below.
To learn more about how this project embeds fonts, click here.
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Special Characters Automatically Encoded by TextCrawler:
double hyphen (2E17): ⸗
lower left half bracket (23A3): ⎣
punctus (00B7): ·
punctus elevatus diagonalis (F1F0):
punctus with comma positura (F1E4):
three dots with comma positura (F1E6):
thorn (00FE): þ
yogh (021D): ȝ
abbreviated er/ir/yr (1DD1), as in: aft ᷑, bett ᷑, dowt ᷑, eu᷑y, eu᷑, man ᷑, m᷑cy, neu ᷑, ou᷑, anoþ ᷑, noþ ᷑, oþ ᷑, þ ᷑, þ ᷑for, þ ᷑fore, þ ᷑of
abbreviated er as a horizontal stroke through an s (1E9C), as in: ẜmown
abbreviated Ierusalem (E5B1+E5D2): Ier
abbreviated ischop (E44D), as in: Erche
abbreviated is/ys (A76D), as in: thowtꝭ
abbreviated m as a line above (0305), as in: hy̅ (also see SPECIAL CASE below)
abbreviated m/n as a dotted inverted breve (0352), as in: co͒fort, co͒fortyd, co͒fortyn, co͒templacyon, cu͒pany, su͒me, su͒tyme, wepy͒g
abbreviated n as a loop on an insular a (F200+2E27), as in: þ⸧ (also see below)
abbreviated ra (0363+0305), as in: gͣ̅ce, pͣ̅yd, sacͣ̅ment
abbreviated re (1DD1), as in: p᷑ste, p᷑y
abbreviated ur/wr (F1C2), as in: confesso , docto , ȝo
Special Characters Encoded Manually:
colon with middle comma positura (F1E5):
five dots (2E2D): ⸭
left square bracket (005B): [
lower right half bracket (23A6): ⎦
one dot over two dots (2E2B): ⸫
pilcrow sign/paragraph sign/section sign (00B6): ¶
punctus elevatus (F161):
right square bracket (005D): ]
squared four dots (2E2C): ⸬
two dots over one dot (2E2A): ⸪
upper left half bracket (23A1): ⎡
upper right half bracket (23A4): ⎤
uppercase closed S (F126):
latin abbreviation sign spacing baseline us (F1A6), as in: stimul
abbreviated a (0363), as in: grͣce
abbreviated ar/er as a stroke upon the descender of P/p (A750/A751), as in: Ꝑty/ꝑty, Ꝑauentur/ꝑauentur
abbreviated con (A76F): ꝯ
abbreviated e as a flourish on r (F19B), as in: wtyn
abbreviated Ihesu crist with a stroke upon the ascender of h (E517): ic
abbreviated n as a loop on an insular a (F200+2E27) or on an u (2E27), as in: c⸧, m⸧, wh⸧, wom⸧, su⸧
abbreviated ri/wir (030D), as in: c̍st, ꝯt̍cyon, inq̍ed, req̍ed
abbreviated ro as a loop on the descender of p (A753), as in: ꝓferyd, ꝓfyth, ꝓꝑy, ꝓpyr
abbreviated us (A770), as in: þꝰ
SPECIAL CASE: generic abbreviation as a line above (0305), as in: beffalle̅, co̅fort, mo̅u̅tegrace, no ̅, no ͣ ̅
