Digital Palaeography

Palaeography, both in the narrow sense of the history of handwriting and more broadly as book history and the study of documents and manuscripts as material objects, stands as the foundation of much of medieval studies. However, the palaeographical method has undergone a significant transformation in recent years, due on the one hand to the ever continuing desire for greater rigour, and on the other to the sudden availability of many thousands - if not millions - of digitised manuscripts and relatively powerful desktop computers with which to manipulate them. This book presents an authoritative reflection of the state of the art in the application of ICT to the field of palaeography. Although the focus is on palaeography in the narrow sense of Western European medieval handwriting, some chapters apply to the field more widely and encompass issues such as crowdsourcing, diplomatics, and digital libraries as well as Hebrew and modern manuscripts.