I've seen manor court rolls from the 1300s and 1400s spell Christine as "Xpine"/"Xpina" before, but that's a new one. I wonder if that's a regional difference in how scribes/printers abbreviated that name, if he didn't quite know how it worked in practice, or didn't trust his readers to work it out?
I suspect it's even more pragmatic than that: the text throughout the book is justified, and spelling it this way fills out the line without having to fiddle with spaces
Ah, that'd make sense, especially now I've spotted the "Cristine" further on. The scribes I see tend to stick to one version of Christine, but that's the comparative luxury of writing by hand, I suppose. The choices made when printing can be so fascinating!
This is not why I'm looking at this book today, but I'm currently obsessed with these microlevel choices that early typesetters make when fitting manuscript material to the printed mise en page. What can be changed, what's necessary to preserve sense and meaning, etc.
I know that Caxton probably did not set this type himself, but it's so easy to see the very human habits of mind and muscle that would lead someone to read "Christine," parse it as "Christ" + "ine" and reach for the "x" and "r" to begin. (Fayttes of Armes, Christine de Pisan, trans. Caxton, 1489)
Tired: putting the Christ back in Christmas. Wired: putting the "XP" back in "XPrystyne" (but only for one paragraph, then we spell it "Cristyne" in the passage immediately following)
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