Palaeographist May 2026

The problem today is a nota sign. Medieval scribes, desperate to save vellum (costly, made from calfskin) and time, invented a shorthand that makes modern texting look verbose. A single tilde over a vowel stands for a dropped n or m . A hooked p means per or par . A squiggle like a 9 with a tail is con . But the Hasty Brother has invented his own. Lena has encountered a symbol that looks like a treble clef after a nervous breakdown. It appears three times in the cartulary, always in the same phrase: “…and to the aforesaid [symbol] of the chapter…”

By J.L. Rivers

At six in the evening, Lena locks the cartulary in a climate-controlled cabinet and walks across the college court to the senior common room. She pours herself a small whisky—Laphroaig, because it tastes like peat and parchment. A young postdoctoral fellow in digital humanities approaches her, beaming. “Lena! We’ve just finished training an AI on 10,000 manuscript pages. It can transcribe Secretary hand at 94 percent accuracy!” palaeographist

She has spent six weeks on this single glyph. She has compared it to 1,200 digitized manuscripts from the Parker Library, the Vatican, and the BnF. She has consulted a specialist in Merovingian chancery hands (no luck) and a retired Jesuit epigraphist (“Could it be a Greek chi?”). She has lain awake at 3 a.m. staring at the ceiling of her college rooms, seeing the symbol burned into her retina like a migraine aura. The problem today is a nota sign

This is the palaeographist’s art: not just reading words, but hearing a voice. The loops of a medieval g can tell you if the scribe was trained at Durham or Winchester. The angle of a pen lift suggests arthritis, impatience, or a cold scriptorium. A sudden shift from black ink to a rust-red indicates a bad batch of oak galls—or a scribe who just ran out of iron and improvised with vermilion. Every mark is a biometric signature, a fingerprint made of carbon and gall. A hooked p means per or par

“And a deliberate scribal error? A correction that was itself corrected? A palimpsest where the undertext is only visible in multispectral imaging?” Lena sets down her glass. She is not being cruel; she is being precise. “I don’t fear the AI. I fear the confidence of people who don’t know what they don’t know. The machine sees patterns. It doesn’t see a tired monk on a winter afternoon, his breath fogging the vellum, his mind on the venison pasty waiting in the refectory. It doesn’t see the tiny, human tremble in the descender of a p .”