Compare methods

	Palaeographic Dating	Historical Hermeneutics
Field	Historiography	Historiography
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1708	1819
Originator	Bernard de Montfaucon (Palaeographia Graeca)	Friedrich Schleiermacher; Wilhelm Dilthey; Hans-Georg Gadamer
Type	qualitative comparative method	qualitative interpretive method
Seminal source	Guyotjeannin, O., Pycke, J., & Tock, B.-M. (1993). Diplomatique medievale (L'Atelier du medieviste, 2). Brepols. ISBN: 9782503503127	Howell, M., & Prevenier, W. (2001). From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods. Cornell University Press. ISBN: 9780801485602
Aliases	Palaeography, Paleographic Analysis, Script Dating, Hand Analysis	Hermeneutics, Textual Interpretation, Hermeneutic Method, Verstehen
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.	Historical hermeneutics is the theory and practice of interpreting historical texts in order to recover their meaning. Growing from the older art of scriptural and legal exegesis, it was generalized by Friedrich Schleiermacher into a universal method of understanding, deepened by Wilhelm Dilthey into the foundation of the human sciences, and given its modern philosophical form by Hans-Georg Gadamer. The method confronts a basic problem: a text from the past was written in a language, genre, and worldview not our own, for an audience whose assumptions we do not share. To understand it, the interpreter must reconstruct what its words meant to its author and first readers, moving in a circle between the meaning of the parts and the sense of the whole. Gadamer added a reflexive turn, insisting that interpreters cannot escape their own historical position but must bring it into a fusion of horizons with the text. Hermeneutics thus supplies the interpretive depth that source criticism, concerned with authenticity and reliability, leaves open.