Palaeography

Palaeography (also spelled paleography) is the study of historical writing systems. The word comes from Greek roots meaning "old" and "to write." It focuses on the history of manuscripts and texts, including how to decipher and date them, and involves analyzing historic handwriting, scripts, meaning, and printed materials.

The discipline primarily examines the forms, processes, and relationships of writing and printing systems as they appear in texts, documents, or manuscripts—analyzing the actual content of a document is a secondary concern. Palaeographers decipher, read, and date manuscripts, and study the cultural and technical context of writing systems, such as how texts like manuscripts, books, codices, tracts, and monographs were made, and the history of scriptoria. This field is crucial for understanding, authenticating, and dating historical texts, but without other evidence, it is hard to determine exact dates from palaeography alone.

Palaeography is one of the auxiliary sciences of history. It is considered to have been founded by Jean Mabillon with his 1681 work, the first textbook on the subject. The term "palaeography" was coined by Bernard de Montfaucon when he published his work on Greek palaeography, Palaeographia Graeca, in 1708.

The discipline is essential for many historians, semioticians, and philologists because it addresses several related questions. Since the style of alphabets, graphemes, or sign systems has constantly evolved within each dialect and language, one must know how to decipher their specific forms and makeup—for example, assessing characters and typology as they existed in different places and times. For handwritten texts, scribes often used many abbreviations and annotations to write faster and more efficiently, and to save space. A specialist palaeographer, philologist, or semiotician must therefore know how to interpret and understand these. Knowledge of individual letterforms, typographic ligatures, signs, typology, fonts, graphemes, hieroglyphics, and general signification forms—including punctuation, syntagm, proxemics, abbreviations, and annotations—allows the palaeographer to read, comprehend, and understand the text, as well as the relationships and hierarchy between texts. The palaeographer must first determine the language, then the dialect, and then the register, function, and purpose of the text. This requires expertise in the formation, history, and evolution of these languages and their communication communities. Second, the historical uses of different handwriting styles, common writing customs, and scribal or notarial abbreviations, annotations, annexures, addenda, and specifics of printed typology, syntagm, and proxemics must be assessed together. Philological knowledge of the register, language, vocabulary, and grammar typical of a given time, place, and circumstance can help palaeographers identify a hierarchy of texts through discourse analysis, determine provenance, and identify forgeries, interpolations, and recensions with precision. This enables professional authenticity in evaluating documents and manuscripts, potentially leading to a critical edition or a critical assessment of a discourse event as rendered in a specific material form.

Knowledge of writing materials and how discourse material was produced is foundational to studying handwriting and printing events and to identifying the periods when a document or manuscript might have been made. An important goal may be to assign a text a date and place of origin, or to determine which translations of a text come from which specific document or manuscript. This is why the palaeographer, along with semiologists and philologists, must consider the style, substance, and formation of the text, document, and manuscript, as well as the handwriting style, printed typology, grapheme types, and lexical and signification systems used.

Palaeography can provide information about when a document was written. However, it is considered a last resort for dating. For book hands, a range of 50 years is the least acceptable spread, and a rule of thumb is to avoid dating a hand more precisely than a range of at least 70 or 80 years. In a 2005 addendum to a 1996 paper, Bruce W. Griffin stated that until more rigorous methods are developed, it is difficult to construct a 95% confidence interval for New Testament manuscripts without allowing a century for an assigned date. William Schniedewind, in his 2005 paper "Problems of Paleographic Dating of Inscriptions," argued that the so-called science of paleography often relies on circular reasoning because there is insufficient data for precise dating, and scholars tend to oversimplify diachronic development, assuming models of simplicity rather than complexity.