Workshop: Transcribing Seventeenth-Century Handwriting: A Toolkit (Sold Out Ticketed Event)
Sponsored by Voyager Press Rare Books and Manuscripts
From tantalizing book annotations to confusing legal documents to seemingly indecipherable religious texts, seventeenth-century documents can be a challenge to read. This workshop will introduce participants to the letterforms, common abbreviations, and conventional symbols that make up the paleographer’s toolkit. Participants will have the opportunity to work with materials (quills, parchment, and handmade paper) similar to those used to produce early manuscripts. After consulting a variety of digital images from American and English manuscript collections, participants will work on several transcription exercises and review them with the instructors. Beyond transcription we will introduce ways to think more productively about the interaction of manuscript and print in the seventeenth-century.