A good number of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts have
been digitized and put online, especially of the Latin Vulgate and the Greek
New Testament. Training yourself to read
from manuscript pages is a great way to exercise your language skills, increase
your mental flexibility, and experience first-hand how the activity of reading differs in different time periods.
How to go about this?
1. Choose a passage
that you’d like to spend time with and translate it first from a print (or
digital) edition that uses all the conventions we’re used to (e.g., spaces
between words, fully spelled words, standardized letter forms). Practice it multiple times so that eventually
you can translate it by looking just at the original language, no notes or
vocabulary help.
2. Using your favorite search engine, find a
digitization of a manuscript of that text online. (I won’t list possible sites because
discovering a treasure on your own, even online, is part of the joy.)
3. Transcribe the
passage from the digital image. You’ll
probably need to toggle between the digital image and the edition of the text
you used in step 1. Moving back and forth between them will help you to
train your eye, to map what’s familiar onto what’s not familiar. Sometimes manuscripts make use of
abbreviations (combining letter forms or indicating letters with special
notations), and you’ll need to unpack them as you transcribe. In my own transcribing, I usually underline letters or portions of words that were abbreviated in the manuscript so my transcription reflects more of what's going on in the manuscript.
4. When you’re done
transcribing, practice reading the digital image in the original language (without focusing too much on what it means in English). Get to the point at which you can read
directly from the image without having to look at your transcription.
5. Now add English back into the picture and translate from the digital image. At
first you may need to consult your notes or a dictionary, but practice until
you can translate by looking directly at the manuscript and nothing else.
6. You might want to
go through this process multiple times, using the same passage but different
manuscripts. That would give you a sense
of paleographical changes over time.
