One summer I had a job in the Penn library improving the catalog data for their medieval Latin manuscripts. The abbreviations were wild. Here is a handbook of t

One summer I had a job in the Penn library improving the catalog data for their medieval Latin manuscripts. The abbreviations were wild. Here is a handbook of them (which includes & = et and &-bar = etiam): https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/213385262.pdf https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/213385262.pdf (pdf). I can see how being "literate" was tougher then than now. There were different handwriting styles, depending on the writing speed (inversely proportional to the quality and thus expense). For example the Codex Sinaiticus is gorgeous: https://www.codexsinaiticus.org/en/manuscript.aspx?book=26&chapter=89&lid=en&side=r&zoomSlider=0 https://www.codexsinaiticus.org/en/manuscript.aspx?book=26&c... (That's a Greek example, not Latin---sorry, I'm not much of a Latinist anymore.) I guess if you don't have mechanical type, you are very motivated to speed up writing. The books I looked at were pretty hasty. Almost everything I saw was a treatise on medicine and biology. They were all "commentaries on Aristotle". I guess that's what you had to do to publish in those days. Besides the paleography, I had to trace the origin & date of the paper used, which was possible from watermarks. We had two huge reference volumes giving known watermarks so you could narrow things down a lot---but often you didn't get an exact match. There was a whole symbology there too.