The Script of the Text

The script is in the form of the Italian Gothic Rotunda, a version of the Gothic script preferred in Italy in the late Middle Ages, especially for the production of liturgical books. It is sometimes referred to as the Italian Gothic Liturgical Hand.

As its name indicates, this book script is characterized by more roundness than the other versions of Gothic. The breadth and strength of the letters allow the text to stand up well to the rich ornamentation and decorated initials that are often incorporated into the manuscripts.  Because of its formal and stately quality, Rotunda was still commissioned by the nobility of the Renaissance for the making of devotional books, even after the increasingly popular Humanistic scripts started to dominate manuscript production in 15th century Italy. It was practiced by clerics and lay scribes even as late as the 18th century.

In the detail, one of the most distinctive features of the script is that some downstrokes terminate as a horizontal line rather than with a short upward stroke. This is seen in the first minims of m and n, the shafts of f, h, r, and tall s, and the descenders of p and q.

You may compare the details as well as the feel of the script in this book with examples of other Gothic scripts. See, for instance,

http://www.humi.keio.ac.jp/~matsuda/collection/script/scriptsample2.html

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Knight, Stan. Historical Scripts from Classical Times to the Rennaissance. New Castle, Delaware, 1998.
Clemens & Graham. Introduction to Manuscript Studies. Cornell University Press, 2007.