Paleographer Course

The paleographer is someone who critically studies ancient scriptures. The study technique is called paleography, the study of the characteristics and evolution of the first forms of writing. In particular, it consists in the ability to read, interpret and date handwritten texts, and to know how to recognize authenticity. Originally an ancillary discipline linked exclusively to classical philology (and therefore to the study of medieval manuscripts containing Latin and Greek texts), the expansion of studies has led to the development of branches relating to the study of manuscript texts belonging to any writing system of any chronological context : therefore there is not a single paleography, but as many paleographies as there are alphabets object of philological study. Paleography is the discipline that critically studies the evolution of ancient scripts in all their manifestations (including those traditionally attributable to epigraphy and papyrology) in order to interpret and localize the texts examined and also to derive from the evolution of alphabetic signs and graphic phenomena, elements for the history of culture. At the base of the paleographic study there is therefore writing. But what is writing? It is nothing other than a means of communication which man uses to fix language and therefore his own thought in visual form, that is, through symbols and signs. There are as many paleographies as there are scriptures: there are Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Greek and Latin ones. We will deal with Latin paleography which studies the history of origins, ie from the seventh century. BC, up to the beginning of the 16th century, therefore it encompasses the whole period that precedes the diffusion of movable type printing, which took place at the end of the 15th century.