Principal librarian of the British Museum and eminent palaeographer, Sir Edward Maunde Thompson (1840-1929) had originally produced a handbook on the history and development of Greek and Latin handwriting in 1893. He extensively revised and expanded it for this 1912 edition, incorporating numerous facsimile plates. Thompson begins his treatment with an introduction to the Greek and Latin alphabets, then surveys ancient writing materials and implements, and describes the use and development of scrolls and codices. Later chapters, accompanied by valuable illustrations, examine the different forms of first Greek then Latin handwritten texts, from the earliest surviving examples (fourth century BCE) to the end of the fifteenth century. Punctuation, accents and abbreviations are considered, and the various scripts - cursive, uncial, majuscule and miniscule - are all illustrated and examined. Tables of Greek and Latin literary and cursive alphabets are also provided.

Latin books are among the most numerous surviving artifacts of the Late Antique, Mediaeval, and Renaissance periods in European history; written in a variety of formats and scripts, they preserve the literary, philosophical, scientific, and religious heritage of the West. The Oxford Handbook of Latin Palaeography surveys these books, with special emphasis on the variety of scripts in which they were written. Palaeography, in the strictest sense, examines how the changing styles of script and the fluctuating shapes of individual letters allow the date and the place of production of books to be determined. More broadly conceived, palaeography examines the totality of early book production, ownership, dissemination, and use. The Oxford Handbook of Latin Palaeography includes essays on major types of script (Uncial, Insular, Beneventan, Visigothic, Gothic, etc.), describing what defines these distinct script types, and outlining when and where they were used. It expands on previous handbooks of the subject by incorporating select essays on less well-studied periods and regions, in particular late mediaeval Eastern Europe. The Oxford Handbook of Latin Palaeography is also distinguished from prior handbooks by its extensive focus on codicology and on the cultural settings and contexts of mediaeval books. Essays treat of various important features, formats, styles, and genres of mediaeval books, and of representative mediaeval libraries as intellectual centers. Additional studies explore questions of orality and the written word, the book trade, glossing and glossaries, and manuscript cataloguing. The extensive plates and figures in the volume will provide readers wtih clear illustrations of the major points, and the succinct bibliographies in each essay will direct them to more detailed works in the field.

This work, by the greatest living authority on medieval palaeography, offers the most comprehensive and up-to-date account in any language of the history of Latin script. It also contains a detailed account of the role of the book in cultural history from antiquity to the Renaissance, which outlines the history of book illumination. Designed as a textbook, it contains a full and updated bibliography. Because the volume sets the development of Latin script in its cultural context, it also provides an unrivalled introduction to the nature of medieval Latin culture. It will be used extensively in the teaching of latin palaeography, and is unlikely to be superseded.

Thousands of documentary and literary texts written on papyri and potsherds, in Egyptian, Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Hebrew, and Persian, have transformed our knowledge of many aspects of life in the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds. Here experts provide a comprehensive guide to understanding this ancient documentary evidence.

Ancient Documents and their Contexts contains the proceedings of the First North American Congress of Greek and Latin Epigraphy (San Antonio, Texas, 4-5 January 2011). It gathers seventeen papers presented by scholars from North America, Europe, and Australia at the first formal meeting of classical epigraphists sponsored by the American Society of Greek and Latin Epigraphy. Ranging from technical discussions of epigraphic formulae and palaeography to broad consideration of inscriptions as social documents and visual records, the topics and approaches represented reflect the variety of ways that Greek and Latin inscriptions are studied in North America today. Contributors are: Bradley J. Bitner, Sarah Bolmarcich, Ilaria Bultrighini, Patricia A. Butz, Werner Eck, John Friend, Peter Keegan, Jinyu Liu, Kevin McMahon, John Nicols, Nadya Popov-Reynolds, Carolynn E. Roncaglia, Stephen V. Tracy, Dennis E. Trout, Georgia Tsouvala, Steven L. Tuck, and Arden Williams.

Excerpt from An Introduction to Greek and Latin Palaeography Although the task which lies before us of investigating the growth and changes of Greek and Latin palaeography does not require us to deal with any form of writing till long after the alphabets of Greece and Rome had assumed their final shapes, yet a brief sketch of the developement of those alphabets, as far as it is known, forms a natural introduction to the subject. The alphabet which we use at the present day is directly derived from the Roman alphabet; the Roman, from a local form of the Greek; the Greek, from the Phoenician. Whence the Phoenician alphabet was derived we are not even yet in a position to declare. The ingenious theory set forth, in 1859, by the French Egyptologist de Rouge of its descent from the ancient cursive form of Egyptian hieratic writing, which had much to recommend it, and which for a time received acceptance, must now be put aside, in accordance with recent research. Until the alphabetic systems Of Crete and Cyprus and other quarters of the Mediterranean shall have been solved, we must be content to remain in ignorance of the actual materials out of which the Phoenicians constructed their letters. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."