Portuguese · Image to Text
Portuguese hands, from Lardosa to Rio de Janeiro
Portuguese archives hold a continuous written record from the ninth century to the twentieth, and very little of it has been typed. These five pages take the scripts in order, with sample sheets, published transcriptions where they exist, and advice on what to tell a model before it starts.
Choose the hand or document type
Portuguese Visigothic Manuscripts and Chartersc. 800–1200Transcribe Visigothic charters and codices from Portugal: open a, looped t, the z behind ç, Era dating clauses and columns of witness signa.
Portuguese Gothic Documentary Handsc. 1200–1400Read Portuguese charters, drafts and cancioneiros of the Gothic centuries: minim strings, r rotunda, nasal tildes and the first acts drawn up in the vernacular.
Cortesão and Johannine Chancery Handsc. 1385–1520Transcribe the cortesã chancery writing of the Avis kings: looped ascenders, letters threaded through one another, royal sinais and heavy contraction.
Portuguese Processual and Encadeada Recordsc. 1500–1650Transcribe Portuguese processual and encadeada writing: chained words, few pen lifts, notarial rubricas and the contractions of Inquisition and court files.
Portuguese Colonial Italic and Mixed Handsc. 1550–1900Transcribe Portuguese parish, notarial and colonial paperwork: italic mixed with older forms, superscript honorifics, and names carried in from four continents.
Transcribing Portuguese across the centuries
What survives is unusually deep for a country of this size. The monastic collections of Lorvão, Paço de Sousa and Guimarães carry charters from the 880s onwards; royal chancery registers run from the thirteenth century; the Inquisition alone left tens of thousands of process files; and parish books, notarial protocols and overseas correspondence fill repositories in Lisbon, Porto, Salvador and beyond.
The writing changes five times. Visigothic cursive holds on in the north until about 1200, later than anywhere else in the peninsula; Gothic hands take over as the first acts in Portuguese appear; the rounded cortesã serves the chancery of the house of Avis; the courts and notaries chain their letters into processual and encadeada writing; and italic, mixed with whatever the writer learnt first, carries parish and colonial paperwork into the nineteenth century.
The people who read these documents are cartulary editors and corpus linguists, genealogists indexing baptism registers, historians of slavery and of the empire, and archivists trying to describe a fonds they cannot yet search.
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