Latin · Image to Text
Two thousand years of Latin, hand by hand
Latin was written continuously from the Roman Republic to the age of print, and its script changed almost beyond recognition more than once along the way. Evidano transcribes each period on its own terms, from a stylus scratched into wax to a Renaissance scholar copying what he took to be an ancient alphabet.
Choose the hand or document type
Roman Capitals and Cursive Documentsc. 100 BCE–500 CETranscribe Roman square and rustic capitals and Old and Later Roman Cursive from wax tablets, papyri and painted walls, checked against the object.
Late Antique Uncial and Half-Uncial Codicesc. 300–700Transcribe fourth- to seventh-century Latin uncial and half-uncial codices – biblical, patristic and classical – with nomina sacra kept intact.
Insular, Visigothic, and Beneventan Latinc. 650–1100Transcribe Irish, Visigothic and Beneventan Latin – three unrelated regional scripts – on real gospel books, commentaries and monastic texts.
Carolingian and Romanesque Minusculec. 750–1150Transcribe the reformed Latin hand of Charlemagne’s scriptoria and its denser Romanesque successor, from gospel books to royal capitularies.
Gothic and Humanistic Latin Manuscriptsc. 1100–1500Transcribe dense Gothic charters and glossed Bibles alongside the humanistic hand Poggio Bracciolini revived, on real documents and manuscripts.
Transcribing Latin across the centuries
What survives spans wax tablets, papyri and painted walls from the Roman world; biblical and classical codices copied in uncial during late antiquity; the unrelated regional book hands of the early medieval British Isles, Spain and southern Italy; the reformed minuscule of Charlemagne’s scriptoria; and the dense Gothic charters and revived humanistic hand of the later Middle Ages, which became the model for printed Roman type.
Script followed politics as much as the calendar. Rome’s capitals and cursive gave way to a Christian uncial hand, which regional monasteries reshaped into three scripts sharing no letterforms at all, until Charlemagne’s court imposed one reformed minuscule across most of western Europe. That hand compressed over three centuries into dense Gothic script, until Italian humanists deliberately looked past it to imitate an older hand they mistook for genuinely ancient writing.
The people transcribing this material today include papyrologists and epigraphers working from a photograph of a damaged object, editors of biblical and patristic texts, classicists tracing how an ancient author survived at all, legal historians reading charters and capitularies, and palaeography students learning to date an unfamiliar hand by its letterforms.
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