Medieval and Early Modern Handwriting

Medieval and early modern handwriting had formal and informal scripts, but all were dominated by what a quill could or could not do. Gothic scripts especially I found very easy to duplicate with quill pens. That doesn’t mean that I found these scripts easy to read, however. Reading and transcribing these texts was almost impossible for me. I found a few which were more eligible, but for the most part it seemed like a different language. Between the differences in spelling, the gothic fonts making most letters look very similar, and scripts that were too short to gain any reference knowledge from, I had a hard time. The scripts which were long enough that I could figure out what they were talking about and use that background knowledge to help decipher words which otherwise would have stumped me was very helpful. I found that the informal hands were also more difficult to read than the formal ones. The informal hands tended to be very cursive-like, which is not a skill that I have practiced in the last 10 years or so. The formal fonts, while dense and alien, still carried more information which I could parse out than the informal hands. I think the ost surprising thing I learned about writing from this period was the differences in spelling. I knew that some words were spelled differently, but the variety of uses of the letters “u,” “v,” “f,” and “s” still caught me off guard. Substituting the “s” sound for all of the characters which looked like “f” helped me read a lot of the texts more easily.