Fun with Transcription

I'm participating in an online course right now on transcribing Renaissance archival documents through the Medici Archive Project in Rome. I have zero experience with archives, but archive research is a large part of the "history" part of art history, so I'll be doing it someday. I was rather unprepared for Renaissance conventions of orthograhy, spelling, punctuation, you name it. The first obstacle is the handwriting itself, which can be absolutely impenetrable, like this week's supplemental document:


I have no idea what this says. In the entire thing, I could pick out the words "della sposa," that's all. Luckily, I'm not alone, no one else in the class can figure it out either. A lot of the other participants clearly have experience reading older hands and know a lot more about Italian grammar than I do, which is a little intimidating.

The chief difficulty in transcribing these documents is the number of abbreviatons that people used--there are a lot, and while some follow fairly standard conventions, others seem just totally random. Some are easy to figure out; if you see a document start off V. S. Ecc.a, that's Vostra Signoria Eccellenza, your excellent lordship. Final vowels are routinely left off words and indicated by a little dash of superscript, so governar' is "governare," etc. More random is how they'll omit letters within a word: de'a is "detta," and dima'davano is "dimandavano." I mean, you're already writing out the whole word, what's one more letter? They will also use multiple abbreviations for long words, so gra'diss.a is "grandissima." And then sometimes I just have no idea, like last week, when the writer of the document identified herself as Caterina Picc.i, and everyone else was like "oh, Caterina Piccolomini, of course!" and I was like wait, what?

There is a little book on medieval and Renaissance document abbreviations that lists some of the most common ones, which is especially key when it's not an abbreviation but rather a symbol, or an entire word indicated by a single letter with some marks above it. Unfortunately, there were no real standards for this back then. Then you have to factor in the legibility, how educated the person was, where in Italy they were from (all the different cities in Italy marked a different day as the beginning of the New Year, so March 25 1547 in Venice is still 1546 in Naples), and, basically, whether they could put a coherent sentence together. It's pretty daunting, and I can't imagine being left on my own to look at this stuff in an archive.

That said, this week's main document was fairly easy to decipher; the writing is very legible, the abbreviations are pretty standard, and I could immediately figure out what they're talking about (that can be a real help in figuring out an otherwise ambiguous word). It's a news report from Antwerp on the current political situation in England, namely the Prayerbook Rebellion of 1549.


I've transcribed it and translated it, since now we're doing a round-robin thing where everyone contributes a line. My favorite is this line:

Che il conte di Varvich et il signor Gray quali erano destinati per capitani quali della armata contro lo scozzesi erano mandate con una parte della gente per impedire le vettovaglie, et havevano intercetti alcuni che venivano in aiuto di detto populo, et fatti morire alcuni preti.

That the count of Warwick and Mr Gray, who were intended to be captains of the armada against the Scots, were sent with a part of the army to impede their supply lines, and they have intercepted some who came to aid those people, and have killed some priests.

Those Protesants did not fuck around...