Free online palaeography resources

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 17^th-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.
• Guillaume Coatalen and Cécile Decaix, ‘Early Modern Hands (1450-1700)’, includes a large sample of different writers catalogued by name, gender, age, social status, profession and location

 

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)