Palaeography

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Palaeography (British) or paleography (American) (from the Greek παλαιός palaiós, "old" and γράφειν graphein, "to write") is the study of ancient handwriting, independent of the language (Koine Greek, Classical Latin, Medieval Latin, Old English, etc.)

Palaeography is in many ways a prerequisite for philology, and it encounters two main difficulties: firstly, since the style of a single alphabet has changed constantly (Carolingian minuscule, Gothic, etc.), it is necessary to know how to decipher the characters that constitute a manuscript. Secondly, these manuscripts carry by necessity many abbreviations for the purpose of saving space — since each page was made from the skin of one sheep, one had to have a sizable flock just to produce a Bible, even an abridged one. The palaeographer must thus know the relevant abbreviations. The & sign, for example, originated from one of these abbreviations, as did the tilde.

This information, about the characters and the abbreviations, permits the palaeographer to transcribe the document, that is, to produce a modern edition, reestablishing the abbreviations. This task is particularly important for transcribing texts in Latin, because the abbreviations frequently occur at the ends of words, and the declension of the Latin noun requires the usage of different endings.

We could describe it as the study of ancient and medieval manuscripts, independent of the language . In a more general sense, palaeography is the practice of reading manuscript text, and of learning how to do so. Pa-le óg-ra’-fí, the science of reading, dating, and analyzing ancient writing on papyrus, parchment, waxed tablets potsherds, wood, or paper. As a rule, Paleography deals with Greek and Latin scripts and their derivatives, excluding Egyptian, Hebrew, Middle, and Far Eastern Scripts. [1].

The first time the term was used in the 18th century (1703) by a Benedictine monk by the name of Bernard de Montfaucon.During the 19th century palaeography fully separates from the science of diplomatics. W.Wittenbach and Leopold Delisle greatly contributed to this separation with their studies between the relationship to the human hand and writing. Their efforts were mainly the directed at Reconstiting "the ductus" ie. the movement of the pen in forming letter, and to establish a genealogy of writing based on the historical developments of its forms. [2].

The palaeographer must know the language of the texts, the abbreviations used, and the various styles of handwriting. Knowledge of writing materials is essential to the study ancient study of hand writing and the identification of the periods in which they are written. [3]. The fundamental work of the palaeographer is to decipher the writings of the past and to assign them a date and a place of origin. This is why the palaeographer must take into account the style and formation of the manuscript or text[4].

Contents

[edit] History of the Latin alphabet

Main article: History of the Latin alphabet

[edit] Ancient paleography

[edit] Medieval palaeography

When the Roman empire collapsed in the 5th century, Europe was taken over by mostly illiterate Germanic peoples; the Ostrogoths ruled Italy, the Visigoths took over Spain and southern France, the Franks settled in central and northern France and the Anglo-Saxons overran the Celts in Great Britain. The Roman Catholic church took on the task of converting the Germanic tribes to Christianity and educating them, and over time developed regional Roman-based, but unique, system of handwriting. These developed into the so called National Hands of Spain (Visigothic script), Italy (Beneventan script), France, and the British Isles (Insular script).

Prior to the time of Charlemagne several parts of Europe even had their own handwriting style. His rule over a large part of the continent provided an opportunity to unify these writing styles in the hand called Carolingian minuscule. Simplistically speaking, the only scripts to escape this unification were the Visigothic (or Mozarabic), which survived into the 12th or 13th century, the Beneventan, which was still being written in the middle of the 16th, and the one that continues to be used in traditional Irish handwriting, which has been in severe decline since the early 20th century and is now almost extinct (the printed form was abolished by the Irish government in the 1950s).

In the 12th century the Carolingian minuscule underwent a change in its appearance to bold and broken letter forms, the Textura (blackletter). This style remained predominant with some regional variants (e.g. the Rotunda) until the 15th century when the humanistic scripts revived the Carolingian minuscule and it spread from the Italian Renaissance all over Europe.

[edit] Modern palaeography

These humanistic scripts are the base for the antiqua and the handwriting forms in western and southern Europe. In Germany and Austria, the Kurrentschrift rooted in the cursive handwriting of the later Middle Ages. With the name of the calligrapher Ludwig Sütterlin this handwriting counterpart to the blackletter typefaces was abolished by Hitler in 1941. After World War II it was taught as alternative script in schools only in some areas until the 1970s; it is no longer being taught.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] Further reading

  • Bernhard Bischoff, Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Cambridge University Press, 1989.
  • E. A. Lowe, Codices Latini Antiquiores: A Palaeographical Guide to Latin Manuscripts Prior to the Ninth Century, Clarendon Press, 1972.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Bruce M.Metzger,"Paleography" in The Encyclopaedia Americana, Vol.XXI New York 1927 p.163.
  2. ^ R.Marichal, “Paleography” in New Encyclopaedia New York: Gale- Thomson, 2003 Vol.X,p.773.
  3. ^ Robert P.Gwinn,"Paleography"in The Encyclopaedia Britannica,Micropaedia,Vol.IX,1986,p.78.
  4. ^ Fernando De Lasala,Exercise of Latin Paleography,Gregorian University Rome 2006 p.7.
The ISO basic Latin alphabet
Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz
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