Compare methods

	Palaeographic Dating	Archival Content Analysis
Field	Historiography	Historiography
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1708	1952
Originator	Bernard de Montfaucon (Palaeographia Graeca)	Adapted from Berelson and Lasswell content analysis; Furet's quantitative history
Type	qualitative comparative method	mixed qualitative-quantitative method
Seminal source	Guyotjeannin, O., Pycke, J., & Tock, B.-M. (1993). Diplomatique medievale (L'Atelier du medieviste, 2). Brepols. ISBN: 9782503503127	Furet, F. (1971). Le quantitatif en histoire. In J. Le Goff & P. Nora (Eds.), Faire de l'histoire (Vol. 1, pp. 42-61). Gallimard. ISBN: 9782070287666
Aliases	Palaeography, Paleographic Analysis, Script Dating, Hand Analysis	Documentary Content Analysis, Archival Coding, Quantitative-Qualitative Content Analysis, Source Coding
Related	4	4
Summary	Palaeography is the study of historical handwriting, and palaeographic dating is its application to the problem of assigning a manuscript to a time and place by the character of its script alone. Developed as a discipline by the Maurist scholar Bernard de Montfaucon, who coined the term in his Palaeographia Graeca (1708), and complemented for Latin by the work that grew out of Mabillon's diplomatics, palaeography rests on the fact that scripts evolved continuously and regionally. Letter forms, the system of abbreviations, ligatures, the angle and weight of strokes, and the overall layout of the page all changed over time and differed between scribal centers. A trained palaeographer reads these features as a stylistic signature, comparing an undated hand against securely dated specimens to bracket its probable date and origin. Because so many medieval and ancient sources bear no date, palaeographic dating is an indispensable instrument of external source criticism.	Archival content analysis adapts the social-scientific technique of content analysis to the systematic study of historical documents held in archives. Where the impressionistic reading of sources risks privileging the vivid or the convenient, content analysis imposes an explicit, replicable procedure: a defined corpus, a coding scheme of categories, the consistent application of those categories to every document, and the analysis of the resulting frequencies and co-occurrences. Pioneered for mass communication by Bernard Berelson and Harold Lasswell, the approach was absorbed into the quantitative history championed by Francois Furet and others, who treated runs of administrative records as data to be counted and tabulated. Applied to archives, however, the method must reckon with a complication absent from designed surveys: the archive was not created to answer the historian's questions. Its categories, survivals, and silences reflect the purposes and power of the institution that produced it, so disciplined coding must be paired with critical reflection on the archive's own logic.