Dutch · Image to Text
Dutch script from the Gothic book hand to the civil register
Dutch has been written since about 1200, and it changed shape with every use it was put to: textualis in a verse codex, bâtarde on a ducal charter, a fast joined cursive in a notary’s protocol, a round school hand filling the blanks of a printed form. Pick the domain that matches your document and the transcription follows the conventions of that hand.
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Middle Dutch Gothic Book Handsc. 1200–1500Transcribe Middle Dutch textualis and hybrida manuscripts: minim strings, r rotunda, long s, y and ij, with checked texts from Beatrijs and the Gruuthuse songs.
Burgundian and Habsburg Dutch Chancery Handsc. 1400–1600Transcribe Dutch charters, privileges, minute books and placards, c. 1400–1600: bâtarde loops, chancery formulas, Roman numeral dates, seals and subscriptions.
Dutch Republic Commercial and Secretary Handsc. 1550–1700Transcribe seventeenth-century Dutch notarial acts, merchant papers and letters: looped secretary cursive, guilders and stuivers, ditto marks and signatures.
Dutch East India Company and Colonial Recordsc. 1600–1800Transcribe VOC and Dutch colonial records: ship journals, dispatches, council minutes and cargo lists, with names spelled by ear in a dozen tongues.
Dutch Church, Civil, and Notarial Handsc. 1700–1900Transcribe Dutch registers, civil-status certificates, notarial deeds and letters from 1700 to 1900, as the old Gothic cursive gives way to a round school hand.
Transcribing Dutch across the centuries
Dutch emerges as a written language in Flanders and Brabant around 1200, and its earliest books are verse: Van Maerlant’s encyclopaedias, the Lancelot compilation, the Beatrijs codex, the songs of the Gruuthuse manuscript. Government follows in the fifteenth century, trade and law in the sixteenth, and by the seventeenth the Republic is producing paper faster than any state of its size — notarial protocols, ledgers, company archives, church registers — written in Amsterdam and equally in Batavia, Cape Town, Manhattan and Willemstad.
Every one of those uses brought its own script. The angular textualis of a verse codex gives way to the looped bâtarde of a ducal charter, that to the joined secretary hand of a merchant or a notary, and that in turn to the round Latin-based writing taught in nineteenth-century schools. Long ſ, r rotunda, the pair ij and strings of undotted minims run through all of them, and so do abbreviations that assume the reader already knows the formula being abbreviated.
The people who work with these pages are editors of Middle Dutch texts, archivists describing charters, genealogists in the notarial and civil-status series, historians reopening the company archives in the Netherlands, Indonesia, South Africa and the Caribbean, and museums publishing family correspondence. The pages below take one hand at a time: what it looks like on the leaf, which letters and abbreviations defeat ordinary OCR, and what to tell a model before you trust what it reads back.
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