Handwriting Transcription

Every manuscript is a typeface of its own

The University of Nottingham’s website has an interactive palaeography exercises to help you practice reading old handwriting.

Although there were several manuscripts in the Nottingham exercise, I was particularly interested in the 15^th-century Textura Quadrata text .

The letters in this text are hard to identify, because the letters “bite” with each other, that is, two consecutive letters share a stroke (e.g. See ‘h’ and ‘e’ in ‘cheyn’, old spelling of chain, in the image). Some letters look very similar, too. For example, i’s don’t have dots, so they are just single minims, or the vertical strokes in letters like m, n, or u (the word ‘minim’ itself is made only of minims).

Although scribes were probably more comfortable reading scripts, biting is still conducive to misreading. Misreading due to confusing letter forms might have contributed to creating textual variants during the copying process.

Also, spelling and capitalization practices are different from today’s convention, so it is hard to be sure if your reading is correct or not. Knowing about morphology of a word should help reading old manuscripts.

Through this practice, I realized there is much more than knowing ABC in reading old handwriting, while reading, or at least decoding letters, seem more straightforward today with the prevalence of consistent letter forms, especially with digital fonts.