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| Paleography Exercises |
| The Harley Psalter, 11th century (British Library, Harley 603). All images by permission of the British Library. |
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| This shows the lower section of a page from the Harley Psalter, an early 11th century codex produced at Christ Church, Canterbury. It is, in fact, a copy of the Utrecht Psalter, a Carolingian book made near Rheims around 820. The many intricate miniatures are copied from this earlier exemplar. There is more than one scribal hand in the book. This page shows a very neat and legible Caroline minuscule script. The Latin text has many differences from the standard Vulgate translation. The text shown here is from Psalms 16, which corresponds to Psalms 17 in a modern Bible. |
| The text of the Vulgate Bible can be obtained from Biblia Sacra Vulgata (1969), among other editions. There is a searchable version on the web at the Multi-lingual Bible site or a plain text version at Vulgate (Latin Bible) Index. |
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| overview | miniature | text | alphabet | abbreviations | exercises | | transcript | translation | |
| Click on each of the above to walk your way through some blocks of text. The transcript will appear in a separate window so that you can use it for reference at any time. These exercises are designed to guide you through the text, not test you, so you can cheat as much as you like. |
 Script sample for this example |
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Index
of Exercises |
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Index
of Scripts |
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If you are looking at this page without frames, there is more information about medieval writing to be found by going to the home page (framed) or the site map (no frames). |
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