Brodie Waddell
Palaeography – the art of reading old handwriting – is a very specialized skill that will not be any use to 99.9 percent of the population. However, if you want to explore original sources produced before c.1750 for a dissertation, genealogy or local history, it may be essential.
The problem is that the script below was a perfectly normal way to write in the seventeenth century.
‘For six Minst Pyes of an Indifferent biggnesse’ (The National Archives, SP 14/189, folio 7)
Luckily, for those of you who would like to learn the basics of reading early modern documents, there are a huge number of helpful resources available, including many that are free and online. They are widely scattered, so this post is an attempt to collect them in a single place.
My one piece of advice is this: the only way to learn palaeography is through practice. There are lots of helpful tricks and techniques mentioned in the resources below, but ultimately it takes at least a few hours of slow, painful transcription before it becomes remotely straightforward.
I would love to hear additional suggestions in the comments.
Online resources
- The National Archives has an excellent free online tutorial for palaeography, 1500-1800. It also has dozens of extra documents in its ‘Further Practice’ section.
- The English Faculty at Cambridge has another free online module: ‘English Handwriting 1500-1700’, which includes a 17th-century handwriting manual and help with dating particular scripts.
- The Institute for Historical Research has a free online module: ‘InScribe Palaeography Learning Materials’
- The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale has a tutorial to learn secretary hand, the most common form of handwriting in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England.
- Oxford’s Rediscovering Rycote project has a very short online tutorial, with some extra exercises.
- Simon Booth’s English Renaissance Handwriting iPod/iPhone App seems promising, though I have not tried it.
- Brigham Young University’s ‘Script Tutorial’ includes palaeography exercises in English, German, Dutch, Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese.
- National Records of Scotland’s Scottish Handwriting, 1500-1800 includes a one-hour basic online tutorial and much else. Useful for non-Scots material too.
- The Folger Shakespeare Library has a crowdsourced online transcription project: Shakespeare’s World. It is great fun, and also includes palaeographical guidance.
- MarineLives is a crowdsourced transcription project that provides palaeography training to its volunteers.
- Bess of Hardwick’s Letters Reading Early Modern Handwriting tutorial, with 18 examples of particular hands.
- Dianne Tillotson’s Medieval Writing
- Dave Postle’s Medieval and Early Modern Palaeography information, exercises and more. You can also download the programme to run on your computer.
- Medieval Abbreviations for deciphering Latin texts.
- The Newberry Library’s French Renaissance Palaeography project, with tutorials and more.
- French ‘Bibliographie de paléographie’ by Marc Smith.
- Marjorie Burghart et al. have created an interactive album of mediaeval palaeography.
Offline training
- The Institute for Historical Research in London offers some in-person courses for reasonable fees.
- The Institute for English Studies runs the London International Palaeography Summer School which includes both standard early modern palaeography and a variety of specialist courses.
- The Warburg Institute in London offers a variety of research training and reading groups, sometimes including Latin palaeography.
- If you are a university student, there is a decent chance there is palaeography training available on campus. Ask your tutor.
- Many archives, record offices and local history groups offer palaeography training.
Books
- Hilary Marshall, Palaeography for Family and Local Historians (2004) is an excellent handbook, packed with examples, which I found very helpful when starting out and which I still use on occasion.
- P. M. Hoskin, S. L. Slinn and C. C. Webb, Reading the Past: Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century English Handwriting (2001). Freely available PDF from the Borthwick Institute, University of York.
- B. Bischoff, Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages (1990)
- E. Boyle, Medieval Latin palaeography: a bibliographical introduction (1984)
- P. Brown, A Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600 (1990)
- P. Brown, The British Library Guide to Writing and Scripts (1998)
- N. Buat and E. van den Neste, Manuel de paléographie française (2016)
- G. Cencetti, Paleografia Latina (1978)
- P. Cherubini and A. Pratesi, Paleografia latina. L’avventura grafica del mondo occidentale (2010)
- E. Gooder, Latin for Local History, 2nd ed. (1978).
- C. Johnson and H. Jenkinson, English Court Hand, AD 1066 to 1500 (1915).
- T. Martin, The record interpreter: a collection of abbreviations, Latin words and names used in English historical manuscripts and records (2nd edn., London, 1910). Free online at archive.org
- C. Newton, Medieval Local Records: a Reading Aid (1971)
- J. Roberts, Guide to Scripts used in English Writings up to 1500 (2005)
- A. Robinson, The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs, and Pictograms (1995)
- J. Stiennon, Paléographie du Moyen Age (1973)
the many-headed monster 
There is also http://www.scottishhandwriting.com/ – it focuses particularly on researchers working with 16th to 18th century Scottish records and so it includes Scots language examples. But it also has plenty of English and Latin material, so its usefulness isn’t confined to Scottish research. I haven’t used it, but it has some particularly nice looking resources (eg examples of particular letters and numbers).
It is indeed a good resource, and has a weeky challenge which can be very entertaining
The symbols for a few weights and measures (for apothecaries’ or cookbook receipts) are listed here: http://www.textcreationpartnership.org/docs/dox/medical.html Occasionally useful 🙂
Thank you for bringing all these resources together! The Mellon Foundation has also a month-long palaeography course in various vernacular languages. The English one, taught by Heather Wolfe from the Folger was extremely useful. I can’t recommend highly enough…
Keele University holds an annual Medieval Latin and Palaeography Summer School which gives instruction in groups varying from absolute beginners to doctoral students and researchers. It’s good fun, too! Details for 2018 will be posted on the Keele website soon.
Really useful, thank you.
The Hill Museum and Manuscript Library has an online course in the history of Latin script (https://www.vhmml.org/school) as well as a paleographical album (https://www.vhmml.org/folio). Both those modules, which are part of the vHMML suite (https://www.vhmml.org/) are due for a refresh in the coming year, but they are definitely open for use and the content and images are there. They can be used for self teaching or for a teacher who wants to do a module with a class. Lessons for eastern Christian script traditions are in the works.
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This is wonderful! Thank you so much for this resource. For a contemporary comparison, ask someone who has practice reading physicians’ handwriting. The decoding skills will transfer to old penmanship as well. Once you get knee-deep into paleography you realize the value of a consistent hand, even if it be a tad sloppy or unique. The variable hands are the worst.
This would have been very useful for me ten years ago. My solution then was to find a kindly old soul who could read the damn stuff for me.
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re: medieval Latin and Italian manuscript abbreviations (which carry over into early printed books)
Your link, “Medieval Abbreviations for deciphering Latin texts,” Abbreviationes (TM) , leads to a web resource that requires payment. It cites and is presumably based on
the classic paleography guide by Cappell:
— A. CAPPELLI. DIZIONARIO DI ABBREVIATURE
LATINI ED ITALIANI. Milano, 1912. LXVIII, 529 p., ill.
Before paying anything, see if your paleographic needs are met by these free versions of Cappelli.
A free website at Michigan State University has turned the Italian version of Cappelli into a useful online guide:
An index to Cappelli is free index at:
Click to access Cappelli%20-%20Diz%20abbreviazioni%20epigrafiche.pdf
The English translation of Cappelli:
— The elements of abbreviation in medieval Latin paleography by Adriano Cappelli. Translated by David Heimann and Richard Kay, Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Libraries, 1982 (University of Kansas Publications. Library Series, 47)
is available as a free PDF:
https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstream/handle/1808/1821/47cappelli.pdf;sequence=3
The German translation:
Lexicon abbreviaturarum. Wörterbuch lateinischer und italienscher Abkurzungen, Adriano Cappelli, zweite Auflage Leipzig 1928
is available free at:
https://archive.org/details/LexiconAbbreviaturarum
Karen Reeds
Princeton Research Forum
5-17-2018
Thanks very much, Karen! I’ve updated that one to link to the English translation of Cappelli.
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Are there any online communities that help with crowdsourcing? Sometimes it’s just helpful to get a couple more sets of eyes on a document in order to decipher it…
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I studied palaeography with Dr Grant Simpson at the University of Aberdeen – his book ‘Scottish Handwriting 1150–1650: An Introduction to the Reading of Documents’ is older, but an excellent source of background information.
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