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Palaeography Information

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]

Contents

Application

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]

Ancient Near East

Drawing of the hieroglyphic seal found in the Troy VIIb layer. Main article: History of writing
See also: Epigraphy and Paleography in medieval Islam

Aramaic palaeography

Table showing the Mandaic alphabet (Abagada) with some of the mysteries represented by the letters.

Greek palaeography

Main article: History of the Greek alphabet

See also:

Indian palaeography

North Indian palaeography

South Indian palaeography

Main article: History of writing in South India

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.

Latin palaeography

Main article: History of the Latin alphabet

History of Latin palaeography

Jean Mabillon, a French Benedictine monk, scholar and antiquary, whose work De re diplomatica was published in 1681, is widely regarded as the founder 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] In the nineteenth century such scholars as Wilhelm Wattenbach, Leopold Delisle and Ludwig Traube contributed greatly to making palaeography independent from diplomatic. In the twentieth century, the 'New French School' of paleographers, especially Jean Mallon, gave a new direction to the study of scripts by stressing the importance of ductus (the shape and order of the strokes used to compose letters) in studying the historical development of scripts.[8]

Antiquity

See the following articles:

Middle Ages

Pre-Caroline

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, a process that began around the 7th century.[9]

Pope Gregory I (Gregory the Great, d. 604) was influential in the spread of Christianity to Britain and also sent Queens Theodelinde and Brunhilda, as well as Spanish bishops, copies of manuscripts. Furthermore, he sent the Roman monk Augustine of Canterbury to Britain on a missionary journey, on which Augustine may have brought manuscripts. Although Italy's dominance as a centre of manuscript production began to decline, especially after the Gothic War (535–554) and the invasions by the Lombards, its manuscripts—and more important, the scripts in which they were written—were distributed across Europe.[10]

From the 6th through the 8th centuries a number of so-called 'National Hands' were developed throughout the Latin-speaking areas of the former Roman Empire. By the late-6th century Irish scribes had begun transforming Roman scripts into Insular minuscule and majuscule scripts. 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]

Beginning in the 8th century, as Charlemagne began to consolidate power over a large area of western Europe, scribes developed a minuscule script (caroline minuscule) that effectively became the standard script for manuscripts from the 9th century to the 11th. Simplistically speaking, the only 'national hands' to continue were the Visigothic (or Mozarabic), which survived into the 12th or 13th century; the Beneventan, which was still being used in the middle of the 16th century; and Insular script, which was used to write texts in the Irish at least through the 20th century and formed the basis for Gaelic type, just as caroline minuscule formed the basis for Roman type.

Carolingian minuscule

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.

Further medieval scripts

Modern period

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.

See also

References

  1. ^ Cardenio, Or, the Second Maiden's Tragedy, pp. 131-3: By William Shakespeare, Charles Hamilton, John Fletcher (Glenbridge Publishing Ltd., 1994) ISBN 0944435246
  2. ^ 'Palaeography', Oxford English Dictionary.
  3. ^ Latin Palaeography Network
  4. ^ Robert P. Gwinn, "Paleography" in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Micropaedia, Vol. IX, 1986, p. 78.
  5. ^ Fernando De Lasala, Exercise of Latin Paleography (Gregorian University Rome, 2006) p. 7.
  6. ^ Bernard de Montfaucon et al., Palaeographia Graeca, sive, De ortu et progressu literarum graecarum, Paris, Ludovicum Guerin (1708).
  7. ^ Bruce M. Metzger, The Text of the New Testament Fourth Edition (Oxford University, 2005), p. 206.
  8. ^ R. Marichal, “Paleography” in New Encyclopaedia New York: Gale-Thomson, 2003 Vol.X, p. 773.
  9. ^ James J. John, "Latin Paleography", in J. Powell, Medieval Studies 2nd. ed. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1992), 15-16.
  10. ^ See Bernhard Bischoff, Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Daibi O Croinin and David Ganz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 83-112; 190-202.
  11. ^ John, 16.

Further reading

Western palaeography

Indian palaeography

Digital palaeography

External links

The ISO basic Latin alphabet
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