Elizabeth Ignota is a font designed by Sandra Kassenaar, especially commissioned for the publication H (2018), edited by Sriwhana Spong and including texts by Ned McConnell, Kate Briggs, Jan Verwoert, Francesco Ventrella, Vera Mey, and Spong. Kassenaar began by exploring the twenty-three letters of Hildegard of Bingen’s Litterae Ignotae (unknown letters), in which Hildegard’s Lingua Ignota (unknown language) was written. Kassenaar’s resulting hand-drawn sketches were then combined with the 1933 font Elizabeth-Antiqua by the German typographer Elizabeth Friedlander. Friedlander, one of the first women to design a typeface, had been commissioned by the Bauer Type Foundry in Frankfurt to create what was to be Friedlander-Antiqua. However, Hitler’s rise to power just as the font was being prepared for casting made the use of Friedlander’s recognisably Jewish name inadvisable, and so Elizabeth-Antiqua was chosen instead. 

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​Kassenaar’s sketches based on Hildegard’s Litterae Ignotae are grafted onto Friedlander’s font like a vine with thin coiled tendrils, appearing to wrap around the letters and almost obscure them. Or, looked at again, Friedlander’s font now appears to serve as a rubbing, picking up and preserving the trace of the Litterae Ignotae, whose tendrils are now held in the frottage Kassenaar has made using Friedlander’s letters. Elizabeth Ignota brings together the alphabets of Hildegard and Friedlander to create a typeface that simultaneously discloses and devours.

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While commissioned especially for the publication H, and used by Spong for page works and posters, Elizabeth Ignota is also available to be used in other projects that share an affinity with the concepts behind the typeface. In 2019, Kassenaar incorporated Elizabeth Ignota into her design for the exhibition Love in a Mist: The Politics of Fertility, curated by Malkit Shoshan, at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Elizabeth Ignota is thus a collaborative work that can be incorporated into other projects by a network of thinkers and makers. It is a work that is functional and conceptual, disperses, disappears, and gives onto other works.

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