Written on the Heart

Love of Lettering

Amid my large collection of art paraphernalia, I find I have a disproportionate amount of calligraphy materials – books, print outs of fonts, nibs and pens, ancient Speedball textbooks. I've always been interested in lettering, so some of these materials are mine, acquired for various printing projects. The majority of materials, however, I inherited from my mother who enthusiastically pursued calligraphy in her retirement years. Mom always had an artistic bent and briefly attended Cooper Union as an art major back in day when Greenwich Village in New York City was the cool place to be an art major. She eventually decided that the art school was a bit too cool for her and her style of art and left to pursue a career as a secretary. When she retired in her 60s, she immediately started taking art classes. There were oil and acrylic painting classes as well as watercolor, but her most repeated classes were always calligraphy. Birthday cards to me and my kids were masterpieces of simple painting and ornate hand lettering. She did a few commissioned pieces for friends and her church, but mainly she lettered because she loved it. And she was good at it.

I always assumed I inherited my artistic abilities from my mom, including my interest in calligraphy, but never thought to look further back than Mom for this seemingly hereditary interest. In researching our Haban roots, I came across an article* about Hutterites and calligraphy. I already knew about their long association with painted pottery, but was surprised to find that they had a long history as calligraphers. This history starts before the Haban, even before the Hutterites themselves, and goes back to the early Anabaptists at the time of the Protestant Reformation.** Initially, the Anabaptists made use of the Fraktur script, a medieval German lettering that was made on geometric principals using a ruler and a compass, then “fractured” (broken up) into the letter design. It is somewhat similar in appearance to what is called Old English lettering, most often associated with Christmas cards and carol titles. This Fraktur lettering survived well past the Middle Ages as it became the go to lettering of the printing press in the early Gutenberg days. The literate Anabaptists jumped at the chance to print their books and Bibles, but when persecution caught up with them, as it always did, they were banned from using the printing press and resorted to hand copying their texts. The ornate Fraktur lettering was initially used, but as divisions occurred among the Anabaptists and they were chased all over Europe, they ended up in different places and were exposed to different lettering. Mennonites went west, taking Fraktur with them. The Hutterites went east with their Fraktur lettering, but now were exposed to the classical Roman lettering know as Antiqua. This became their new go-to lettering for copying Latin texts, keeping the old Fraktur lettering for the “barbaric” languages. The Hutterites were also exposed to Turkish and Arabic calligraphy in the then Turkish-occupied Hungary. The Hutterites may have adopted some of the stylings of the Arabic calligraphy, but more significantly they copied the reverence and perfection with which the Turks copied the Qu'ran. The Hutterites applied this reverence to the copying of the Bible, and both boys and girls were taught to read and copy the Bible carefully by hand in the Hutterite schools. As a result, Hutterites were often respected in the illiterate rural communities they had settled into, protected and employed by the upper class because of their literacy and precise calligraphic skills.

Fraktur

Antiqua

The Hutterites who fled Grandma and Grandpa's towns, choosing not to stay and become Haban, took their love of lettering with them. Hutterite girls in the Dakotas and Canada incorporated the Fraktur and Antiqua lettering into their hand embroidered samplers. But examples of lettering still exist in Haban towns as well. The picture of the book below, found on the facebook page Habánsky dom o.z. Moravský Svätý Ján, is a good representation of the Fraktur lettering, the book possibly a copy of one of the Hutterite chronicles. From the neatness of the lettering I suspect that the book was printed on a press and not hand-lettered. (I have no idea what is written on the open pages, though the side bar of the facebook page, written in Slovak, contains the names Cederle, Tschetter, Pullman, Wirth, Baumgartner, Muller and Kleinedler, all Haban names related to Grandma and Grandpa in some way.)

Mom's love of lettering may have been more caught than taught, though I don't think she had any inkling of the Haban heredity that might have influenced her foundness for fonts. As for me, my choice of lettering when I do letter is less Fraktur and Antiqua and more Drops of Jupiter and Skinny Caps. Still, after finding this lettering connection to the Haban and Hutterite writing, I find myself wanting the precision and reverence of my ancestors to come through in my calligraphy. A perfect and holy Harlott font, perhaps?***

*Maria H. Krisztinkovich, Historical Hungary as Background for Hutterite Needlework in Canada, Hungarian Studies Review, Vol. VIII, No. 1 (Spring 1981) (Don't ask. I run across some of my information in the most serendipitious ways...)

**Check out https://habanrus.blogspot.com/2018/07/thecurse-of-martin-luther-churchhistory.html and https://habanrus.blogspot.com/2018/07/tobaptize-or-not-to-baptize-or-when-to.html if you need a review of Anabaptist/Hutterite/Haban history.

***Yes, this is a popular lettering style.

For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. - Jeremian 31:33