The literary sources have next to nothing to say about the technique of writing. In antiquity, scribes seem to have rested the material usually on the knee, in the middle ages by contrast on a sloping desk. Numerous pictures of scribes (portraits of the evangelists in particular) show the position of the hand for calligraphic writing. The quill is held with three extended or slightly curved fingers (‘tres digiti scribunt’) and two tucked in, while the hand rests only on the little finger, without any support from the arm. This method of supporting the writing hand — so fundamentally different from modern practice — remained unchanged until the time of the sixteenth century writing masters. The position of the arm, changes in the manipulation of the quill, and besides that the material of the instrument itself (whether reed or feather) and the cut of the quill, all these changed with time and from one to another of the script regions, as the physiological analysis of the script shows. Hence it is difficult to get a clear picture of the interplay of the various factors, and the inferences about the mechanics of writing that can be drawn from the external appearance seem to have only relative validity.

Much can be gleaned from ‘probationes pennae’ about the methodical procedure of elementary writing instruction in the early middle ages (in which classical practices apparently survive). Once the pupil had learned the entire alphabet, beginning with simple strokes, this was then drilled by copying of mnemonic verses.10 Not before the later middle ages, however, do we get more detailed information about these didactic methods. Schoolmasters of this period — Master Hugo Spechtshart of Reutlingen and various other anonymous ones - have left detailed descriptions, in verse and in prose, of the common, everyday Script:12 In part they proceed from the breakdown of the letters into various strokes, {Zerstreuungen), which are practised one by one. In fact, the mastery both of cursive and textura was widespread.