Pens

It can be inaccurate—and sometimes a bit of an anachronism—to have everyone up until recent times writing with quill pens. Quills have been around a long time, to be sure, but their era of greatest popularity and usage was relatively recent. So what did writers use in the Middle Ages and Antiquity?

Reed pens were common, and the ‘thrifty’ choice. Yes, a piece of stiff reed, pointed with a knife and resharpened as needed. The Romans used them. The ancient Egyptians used them (and maybe even invented them). Being more-or-less flat, they create a very different sort of line than a quill, something much more like a broad-nib pen.

This is not to say quills weren’t used all through man’s history. Any pointed object is likely to have been dipped and used. And, of course, brushes were invented too, very far back. Metal-nibbed pens were created and used, and were the popular choice of those who could afford them. More than a few medieval manuscripts were written with them. The uncial and black-letter forms, and those of the early cast type from the Renaissance, reflect the shapes such pens create.

The quill makes a quite different sort of impression on paper. One does not achieve wider and narrower strokes from the angle at which pen meets paper but from how firmly one pushes down. The tip is more flexible than in those other pens. This led to noticeable differences in handwriting in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries when the quill became more popular. Those differences were reflected in the typefaces created (but that’s another subject).

So, certainly, give your scribes quill pens if you wish, but remember they were not the universal choice, and relatively rare in some places and periods. Details such as dipping a reed into an ink-pot provide a certain authenticity and a different flavor to the worlds we create on our own paper—perhaps even with a pen.