Probatio pennae (also written ''probatio pennę;'' in

Medieval Latin Medieval Latin was the form of Literary Latin used in Roman Catholic Western Europe during the Middle Ages. In this region it served as the primary written language, though local languages were also written to varying degrees. Latin functioned ...

; literally "pen test") is the medieval term for breaking in a new pen, and used to refer to text written to test a newly cut pen. A

scribe A scribe is a person who serves as a professional copyist, especially one who made copies of manuscripts before the invention of automatic printing. The profession of the scribe, previously widespread across cultures, lost most of its promi ...

would normally test a newly cut pen to see if it wrote well by writing a few lines of text on a piece of

blotting paper Blotting paper, called bibulous paper, is a highly absorbent type of paper or other material. It is used to absorb an excess of liquid substances (such as ink or oil) from the surface of writing paper or objects. Blotting paper referred to as b ...

. Sometimes these blotting papers survived due to being used afterwards as book binding material; they often provide unique, less "serious" textual material that would otherwise have been lost. A famous example is "

Hebban olla vogala "Hebban olla vogala", sometimes spelled "hebban olla uogala", are the first three words of an 11th-century text fragment written in Old Dutch. The fragment, also known as the Rochester Poem, was discovered in 1932 on the flyleaf of a manuscript t ...

", one of the first fragments of

Dutch literature Dutch language literature () comprises all writings of literary merit written through the ages in the Dutch language, a language which currently has around 23 million native speakers. Dutch-language literature is the product of the Netherlands, Be ...

, which survived from a tenth-century ''probatio pennae''.

References

{{writingsystem-stub Latin words and phrases Writing