Palaeography, also spelt paleography (from Greek παλαιός palaiós, "old" and γράφειν graphein, "to write") is the study of ancient writing. Included in the discipline is the practice of deciphering, reading, and dating historical manuscripts,[2] and the cultural context of writing, including the methods with which writing and books were produced, and the history of scriptoria.[3]
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Palaeography can be an essential skill for historians and philologists, as it tackles two main difficulties. First, since the style of a single alphabet in each given language has evolved constantly, it is necessary to know how to decipher its individual characters as they existed in various eras. Second, scribes often used many abbreviations, usually so as to write more quickly and sometimes to save space, so the specialist-palaeographer must know how to interpret them. Knowledge of individual letter-forms, ligatures, punctuation, and abbreviations enables the palaeographer to read and understand the text. The palaeographer must know, first, the language of the text (that is, a 21st-century English or French speaker must become expert in the relevant earlier forms of these languages); and second, the historical usages of various styles of handwriting, common writing customs, and scribal/notarial abbreviations. Philological knowledge of the language, vocabulary, and grammar generally used at a given time or place can help palaeographers identify ancient or more recent forgeries versus authentic documents.
Knowledge of writing materials is also essential to the study of handwriting and to the identification of the periods in which a document or manuscript may have been produced.[4] An important goal may be to assign the text a date and a place of origin: this is why the palaeographer must take into account the style and formation of the manuscript and the handwriting used in it.[5]
Jean Mabillon, a French Benedictine monk, scholar and antiquary, whose work De re diplomatica was published in 1681, is widely regarded as the "father" of the twin disciplines of palaeography and diplomatics. However, the actual term "palaeography" was coined (in Latin) by Bernard de Montfaucon, a Benedictine monk, in the title of his Palaeographia Graeca (1708), which remained a standard work in the specific field of Greek palaeography for more than a century.[6] With their establishment of paleography, Mabillon and his fellow Benedictines were responding to the Jesuit Daniel Papebroch who doubted the authenticity of some of the documents which the Benedictines offered as credentials for the authorisation of their monasteries.[7] Later scholars who contributed to the development of the discipline included Wilhelm Wattenbach and Leopold Delisle, who studied of the relationship between the human hand and writing. Their efforts were mainly directed at reconstructing "the ductus" — the movement of the pen in forming the letter — and at establishing a genealogy of writing based on the historical developments of its forms.[8]
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The earliest attested form of writing in South India is inscriptions found in caves, associated with the Chalukya and Chera dynasties. These are written in variants of what is known as the Cave character, and their script differs from the Northern version in being more angular. Most of the modern scripts of South India have evolved from this script, with the exception of Vatteluttu, the exact origins of which are unknown, and Nandinagari, which is a variant of Devanagari that developed due to later Northern influence.
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James J. John points out that the disappearance of imperial authority around the end of the 5th century in most of the Latin-speaking half of the Roman Empire does not entail the disappearance of the Latin scripts, but rather introduced conditions that would allow the various provinces of the West gradually to drift apart in their writing habits.[9]
Gregory the Great is widely responsible for the use of Latin post-Rome. He sent Queens Theodelinde and Brunhilda, as well as Spanish bishops, copies of manuscripts. Furthermore, he sent Augustine to Britain to proselytize (see Bede’s History of the English Church) and the manuscripts he sent with him are the core of missionary work. Although Rome loses dominance as a production centre, its manuscripts were distributed across Europe.[10]
The Irish would be transforming a variant version of half-uncial by the late 6th century. A series of transformations, for book purposes, of the cursive documentary script that had grown out of the later Roman cursive would get under way in France by the mid-7th century. In Spain half-uncial and cursive would both be transformed into a new script, the Visigothic minuscule, no later than the early 8th century.[11]
Prior to the era of Charlemagne, several parts of Europe had their own handwriting styles. Charlemagne's rule over a large part of the continent offered an opportunity to unify these styles in the hand called Carolingian minuscule. Simplistically speaking, the only scripts to escape this unification were the Visigothic (or Mozarabic) styles, which survived into the 12th or 13th century; the Beneventan, which was still being used in the middle of the 16th century; and the script that is still 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, Carolingian minuscule underwent a change in its appearance and adopted bold and broken Gothic letter-forms. This style remained predominant, with some regional variants, until the 15th century, when the Renaissance humanistic scripts revived a version of Carolingian minuscule. It then spread from the Italian Renaissance all over Europe.
These humanistic scripts are the base for the antiqua and the handwriting forms in western and southern Europe. In Germany and Austria, the Kurrentschrift was 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 an alternative script in some areas until the 1970s; it is no longer taught. Secretary hand is an informal business hand of the Renaissance.
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