Palaeography

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William Shakespeare's will, written in secretary hand: a script difficult for modern readers to interpret^[1]

Palaeography, also spelt paleography, παλαιός palaiós, "old" and γράφειν graphein, "to write") is the study of ancient handwriting and the practice of deciphering and reading historical manuscripts.^[2]

Palaeography can be an essential skill for historians and philologists, as it tackles two main difficulties. First, since the style of a single alphabet in each given language has evolved constantly, it is necessary to know how to decipher its individual characters as they existed in various eras. Second, scribes often used many abbreviations, usually so as to write more quickly and sometimes to save space, so the specialist-palaeographer must know how to interpret them. Knowledge of individual letter-forms, ligatures, punctuation, and abbreviations enables the palaeographer to read and understand the text. The palaeographer must know, first, the language of the text (that is, a 21st-century English or French speaker must become expert in the relevant earlier forms of these languages); and second, the historical usages of various styles of handwriting, common writing customs, and scribal/notarial abbreviations. Philological knowledge of the language, vocabulary, and grammar generally used at a given time or place can help palaeographers identify ancient or more recent forgeries versus authentic documents.

Knowledge of writing materials is also essential to the study of handwriting and to the identification of the periods in which a document or manuscript may have been produced.^[3] An important goal may be to assign the text a date and a place of origin: this is why the palaeographer must take into account the style and formation of the manuscript and the handwriting used in it.^[4]

Palaeography is not to be confused with Palaeogeography.

History of the Term

The first time the term "palaeography" was used was perhaps in 1708 by Bernard de Montfaucon, a Benedictine monk. ^[5] During the early 19th century, Palaeography was fully separated from the science of diplomatics. Wilhelm Wattenbach and Leopold Delisle greatly contributed to this development with their studies of the relationship between the human hand and writing. Their efforts were mainly directed at reconstituting "the ductus" — the movement of the pen in forming the letter — and at establishing a genealogy of writing based on the historical developments of its forms.^[6]

Ancient Near East

See also: Epigraphy and Paleography in medieval Islam

• Cuneiform script
  • Hittite cuneiform
• Egyptian hieroglyphs
• Anatolian hieroglyphs
• Middle Bronze Age alphabets
• South Arabian alphabet

Greek palaeography

• Inscriptiones Graecae
• Epichoric alphabet
• Cumae alphabet

Indian palaeography

• Brahmi

North Indian palaeography

• Devanagari

South Indian palaeography

The earliest attested form of writing in South India is inscriptions found in caves, associated with the Chalukya and Chera dynasties. These are written in variants of what is known as the Cave character, and their script differs from the Northern version in being more angular. Most of the modern scripts of South India have evolved from this script, with the exception of Vatteluttu, the exact origins of which are unknown, and Nandinagari, which is a variant of Devanagari that developed due to later Northern influence.

• Grantha script
• Tamil script
• Malayalam script
• Telugu script
• Kannada script
• Chalukya script
• Chera script
• Nandinagari

Aramaic palaeography

• Aramaic alphabet
• Syriac alphabet
• Mandaic alphabet
• Sogdian alphabet

Latin palaeography

Antiquity

See the following articles:

• Old Italic alphabet
• Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum
• Roman square capitals
• Roman cursive
• Rustic capitals

Middle Ages

Prior to the era of Charlemagne, several parts of Europe had their own handwriting styles. Charlemagne's rule over a large part of the continent offered an opportunity to unify these styles in the hand called Carolingian minuscule. Simplistically speaking, the only scripts to escape this unification were the Visigothic (or Mozarabic) styles, which survived into the 12th or 13th centuries; the Beneventan, which was still being used in the middle of the 16th Century; and the script that is still used in traditional Irish handwriting, which has been in severe decline since the early 20th Century and is now almost extinct. (The printed form was abolished by the Irish government in the 1950s).

In the 12th Century, Carolingian minuscule underwent a change in its appearance and adopted bold and broken Gothic letter-forms. This style remained predominant, with some regional variants, until the 15th Century, when the Renaissance humanistic scripts revived a version of Carolingian minuscule. It then spread from the Italian Renaissance all over Europe.

Further medieval scripts

• Beneventan script
• Gaelic script
• Insular script
• Merovingian script
• Uncial script
• Visigothic script

Modern period

These humanistic scripts are the base for the antiqua and the handwriting forms in western and southern Europe. In Germany and Austria, the Kurrentschrift was rooted in the cursive handwriting of the later Middle Ages. With the name of the calligrapher Ludwig Sütterlin, this handwriting counterpart to the blackletter typefaces was abolished by Hitler in 1941. After World War II, it was taught as an alternative script in some areas until the 1970s; it is no longer taught.

See also

• Calligraphy
• Codicology
• Diplomatics
• Epigraphy
• Graffiti
• Historical Documents
• Isogloss
• Jean Mabillon
• List of New Testament papyri
• List of New Testament uncials
• Ludwig Traube (palaeographer)
• Philology
• Scribal abbreviation
• Category:Palaeographic letter variants

External links

• 'Manual of Latin Paleography' (A comprehensive PDF file containing 77 pages profusely illustrated, August 2008).
• 'Palaeography'. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1911.
• Palaeography: reading old handwriting 1500 - 1800: A practical online tutorial, from the National Archives (UK)
• A comprehensive survey of all the important aspects of medieval palaeography.
• A scholarly maintained web directory on palaeography (in German).
• Another scholarly maintained web directory on palaeography (200 links with critical comments, in French).
• Comprehensive bibliography (1,200 detailed references with critical comments in French).
• Online Tuition in the Palaeography of Scottish Documents 1500-1750
• An introduction to Greek and Latin palaeography by Thompson, Edward Maunde - Outdated (published 1912) but good and useful illustrated handbook, available as facsimile.
• Free palaeographical fonts

Further reading

Western palaeography

Indian palaeography

References

1. ^ Cardenio, Or, the Second Maiden's Tragedy, pp. 131-3: By William Shakespeare, Charles Hamilton, John Fletcher (Glenbridge Publishing Ltd., 1994) ISBN 0944435246
2. ^ 'palaeography', Oxford English Dictionary.
3. ^ Robert P. Gwinn, "Paleography" in The Encyclopaedia Britannica, Micropaedia, Vol. IX, 1986, p. 78.
4. ^ Fernando De Lasala, Exercise of Latin Paleography (Gregorian University Rome, 2006) p. 7.
5. ^ Bernard de Montfaucon et al., Palaeographia Graeca, sive, De ortu et progressu literarum graecarum, Paris, Ludovicum Guerin (1708).
6. ^ R. Marichal, “Paleography” in New Encyclopaedia New York: Gale-Thomson, 2003 Vol.X, p. 773.