Among the terms that new book collectors sometimes have difficulty grasping are several that derive from the manuscript tradition that preceded (and for many decades parallelled) early printed books. Booksellers' catalogs, for example, frequently list books whose pages contain initials that are figural, gymnastic, inhabited or historiated.
Fortunately, resources like ODLIS (Online Dictionary of Library & Information Science) are now available to help new book collectors puzzle out these and other confusing terms.
Figural initials are initial letters composed wholly or in part of designs representing animals, humans, and/or imaginary beings unrelated to the text (termed, respectively, zoomorphic, anthropomorphic and zoo-anthropomorphic.) For example: the anthropomorphic initial I, below, is from a 13th century manuscript, the Office Lectionary (via Artnet):
Sometimes, figures must be contorted or exaggerated in order to suggest an initial, as in the case of the anthropomorphic initials depicted below:
Such initials are termed gymnastic initials. In the case of both the figural initial and the gymnastic initial, the figure(s) is the initial, and vice-versa. In both cases, the initial serves a purely decorative function -- it does not comment upon or reflect the text with which it is associated. This is an important distinction to which we shall return shortly.
Figures sometimes appear within an initial, without actually being the initial. When such initials are purely decorative, they are called inhabited initials. A typical example is depicted below, from Alessandro Donati's Roma vetus ac recens utriusque aedificiis ad eruditam cognitionem expositis (Romae: M. Manelphij, 1639):
The above initials are not always "pure" types -- a gymnastic anthropomorphic initial, for example, may also be an inhabited zoomorphic initial. Nor do such initials always serve a purely decorative purpose. When such initials are identifiable figures and have a narrative purpose (whether or not the narrative is associated with the text they illustrate), such initials are known as historiated initials.
First encountered in insular illumination from the 1st half of the 8th century CE, historiated initials are basically picture stories that the typical reader would be expected to easily grasp (such as the Christian Nativity depicted below, from Ms 1171 fol.9, Bridgeman Art Library):
Such scenes often spilled beyond the confines of a single initial, frequently taking up the entire margin(s) of a page, a state of affairs captured by the term historiated border. The example below is from the so-called Black Book of Hours (Hours of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Wien Ö.N. Codex 1856):
Such initials and borders have not entirely disappeared from printed books, as can be seen from modern fine press productions like the Golden Cockerel Press version of the Four Gospels... (illustrated by Eric Gill; 1931):
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