Flourishing

Flourishing, as the name suggests, is a form of embellishing the text of a manuscript by the scribe, often at an incipit or an initial.

Flourishing has been an important tool in localising and dating fifteenth-century medieval manuscripts from the northern Netherlands. As this type of decoration is also to be found in incunabula, the evidence from printed books may contribute towards a more precise dating of the penwork in manuscripts. It cannot, however, help in localising the flourishing. Upon completion, copies of printed books were often sold unadorned, to be rubricated and decorated elsewhere. A large-scale study of their pen flourishing could however offer more information about trade circuits, clients and the reception of incunabula [1].