Palaeographic Dating

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.