Grid as Ground: Ruled Lines and Manuscript Images

Hanna Vorholt, University of York

Friday, February 20, 2025, 12:00 - 1:30 pm EST

Most printed and electronic documents, like this one, show text organized along invisible horizontal and vertical lines. In medieval Europe, where the primary text technology was the manuscript, lines formed visible grids on the parchment or paper surface. Scholars have examined the resulting patterns and analysed their role in the layout of the written text. While manuscript images were frequently executed on the same ruled surfaces as the written text, their relationship to the ruling has rarely been the subject of research. Hanna Vorholt’s forthcoming book Grid as Ground provides the first sustained analysis of this topic across the wide range of image types encountered in manuscripts, from tables, maps, and diagrams, to figural imagery across different domains of learning. The lecture introduces the project and some of the opportunities this analysis presents for humanities research on lines and grids as tools for cognition, creativity, and control.