Italian · Image to Text
Six centuries of Italian writing, transcribed
Italy produced more kinds of writing than anywhere else in medieval and early modern Europe, and kept most of them. Choose the domain that matches your material — a Trecento verse codex, a merchant’s ledger, a notarial parchment, a humanist’s draft or a Seicento letter — and the transcription follows the conventions of that hand.
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Italian Vernacular Gothic Textualisc. 1200–1400Transcribe Trecento Italian verse and prose in rotunda textualis: biting bows, r rotunda, ç and k spellings, tironian et and rubricated tercets, on real folios.
Italian Mercantesca Accounts and Correspondencec. 1250–1550Transcribe Italian merchant hands: dare-and-avere ledgers, Datini letters, insurance policies, Roman numerals in lire, soldi and denari, and Florentine dating.
Italian Cancelleresca and Notarial Handsc. 1300–1600Transcribe Italian notarial instruments, chancery contracts and papal bulls: suspended formulae, tabellion signs, indiction dates and Latin mixed with volgare.
Italian Humanistic Minuscule and Cursivec. 1400–1600Transcribe Renaissance humanistic hands: littera antiqua and sloping cursive, ae ligatures, q; abbreviations, display capitals, marginalia and authors’ drafts.
Early Modern Italian Italic and Mixed Documentary Handsc. 1500–1700Transcribe Italian letters and records of 1500–1700: italic and mixed hands, V.S. Ill.ma abbreviations, secretaries’ hands, autograph signatures and dockets.
Transcribing Italian across the centuries
What survives is unusually deep as well as wide. State archives hold notarial registers running in series from the thirteenth century, the Datini fondo at Prato preserves tens of thousands of letters and account books, and the libraries hold hundreds of Commedia manuscripts beside the codices humanists made for their patrons. Most of it is described only at series level, which is why transcription is the step that opens it.
The hands changed with what they were for. Books of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries use the round Italian textualis; merchants trained in the abacus schools wrote a looped mercantesca in their ledgers; notaries and chanceries used a sloping cursive full of suspended Latin formulae. About 1400 the humanists cut back to a clear minuscule modelled on Carolingian books, and their sloping version, taught by the writing masters of the 1520s, became the italic of Italian letters and records into the seventeenth century.
Each domain page sets out what its hand looks like, why generic OCR fails on it, and how to brief and check a transcription — for editors, archivists, economic and legal historians, genealogists and linguists alike.
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