HIST42530: Palaeography: Scribes, Script and History from Antiquity to the Renaissance

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• To gain a specialist knowledge of the evolution of hand-writing, particularly book scripts, from the first to the sixteenth century AD, both in Latin and, to some extent, the vernaculars, and to gain experience in reading and transcribing them.

• The major script types practised during this long period of European history will be examined in chronological order; the forms of writing will be studied in relation to their contexts and functions, and practice will be given in learning how to read them.

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• Knowledge of the main forms of medieval and renaissance script and their applications.
• Awareness of the interplay between forms of writing on the one hand and broader trends of history and culture on the other.
• Familiarity with principal developments in, and current resources for, the study of palaeography.

Subject-specific Skills:

• Ability to read premodern texts and to transcribe them according to current scholarly conventions.
• Facility in expanding the most common abbreviations and knowledge of the available resources for tackling the others.
• Ability to recognise, date and localise the main script types current in western Europe, especially the British Isles, from the Sixth Century to the Sixteenth.

Key Skills:

• Training in Palaeography

• Student learning is facilitated by a range of teaching methods.
• Fortnightly seminars will focus on studying, expounding and reading typical examples of writing for each main period. As appropriate, skills such as decoding abbreviations will be introduced. Seminars provide students with a forum in which to assess and comment critically on the findings of others, defend their conclusions in a reasoned setting, and advance their knowledge of palaeography.Structured reading requires students to focus on set materials integral to the knowledge and understanding of the module. Use of published collections of facsimiles with transcriptions, and palaeographical manuals, will enable students to practise further with the scripts most relevant to their work and to read further about the development of particular scripts and their cultural contexts, which can then be used and discussed in other areas of the teaching and learning experience.
• Assessment is by means of a 5000 word exercise embracing transcription and analysis, to demonstrate that the student has acquired adequate skill in reading historic script, and has an understanding of how to analyse the evidence encoded in the appearance of a hand or hands. The option of specimens in the vernacular will mean that candidates who are new or relatively new to Latin need not be disadvantaged.

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