ENGLISH 202: Practical Paleography

Course Description

This is an Introduction to the major medieval hands that will help a scholar identify, date, and localize any manuscript they might encounter. The goal is to provide exposure to fundamental paleographic principles of features, aspect, scholarly descriptive language, paleographic historiography, and methodologies, to build an analytical toolset for future in-depth manuscript study. Over the course of ten sessions, team-taught by Stanford experts, students will gain broad exposure to a range of document types from a broad chronological and geographic sampling, learning how to apply paleographic analysis to these documents. Directed readings through the quarter will allow for further self-guided learning and provide a core of reference materials for future study. The emphasis is on practical skills acquisition for any student hoping to work with medieval documents. The course will be held in Stanford's Department of Special Collections and draw upon our extensive collection of medieval primary source materials and reference library of secondary literature and facsimiles. Weekly exercises will focus on transcription, paleographic feature recognition, comparison, and other hands-on exercises. For one unit, weekly attendance and participation is required. For two units, a substantial transcription and analysis final project will be added.