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

Medieval Latin Medieval Latin was the form of Literary Latin used in Roman Catholic Church, Roman Catholic Western Europe during the Middle Ages. It was also the administrative language in the former Western Roman Empire, Roman Provinces of Mauretania, Numidi ...

; 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 Printing press, automatic printing. The work of scribes can involve copying manuscripts and other texts as well as ...

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 is a highly absorbent type of paper used to absorb ink or oil from writing material, particularly when quills or fountain pens were popular. It could also be used in testing how much oil is present in products. Blotting paper ...

. 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", 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, ...

, which survived from an eleventh-century ''probatio pennae'' in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 340.

References

{{writingsystem-stub Latin words and phrases Writing