Handwriting Transcription

THE ASSIGNMENT: During Week Three, we were asked to try several transcription exercises on the University of Nottingham website. We looked at images of short sentences from medieval manuscripts, written in different medieval scripts, and were asked to transcribe them to the best of our ability. We were then asked to pick a longer text, and transcribe about 200 words of it in our own hands to the best of our ability.

During the Nottingham exercises, I was struck by how much the shape of the letters of the same alphabet have evolved in written practice over time. I could decipher very few of the words in each exercise (the two images below show my attempts). This was due in part to archaic spellings of words, but I also ran into much trouble with the shapes of the letters themselves, and how they were often combined as well as being shaped differently from my modern understanding. This made me consider the consistency across time that print seems to have introduced into our writing system. As we discussed in class during week two, there are a number of different fonts available for our use, but all of the commonly used fonts share a basic understanding of letter shape that, as far as I understand, dates back to early printing presses. 

The screenshots above are from work done at https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/toolkits/play_2887

While working on my own handwritten transcription (I chose an early draft of “The Charge of the Light Brigade”), the biggest issue I came up against was regulating my own writing in such a way as to make it legible to others. My cursive handwriting instinctively contains shorthand that I understand but that may be inaccessible to others, such as lowercase “t”s and “h”s sharing a stem when they are next to each other so that they end up looking rather like this: ħ. This helped me understand how combined letters came to be popular in medieval writing, when scribes had such large quantities of copy work to do. I have included a portion of my transcription below.