Spanish · Image to Text
Twelve centuries of Spanish handwriting, read line by line
Spanish archives run from tenth-century monastic charters to eighteenth-century parish books in Manila, and no single reading system covers them. Pick the domain that matches your material and see the letterforms, abbreviations and layouts it involves, with sample pages and published transcriptions where they exist.
Choose the hand or document type
Iberian Visigothic Manuscripts and Chartersc. 700–1200Transcribe Iberian Visigothic minuscule and cursive: the open a, the ti ligature, the tailed z behind ç, era dates and chrismons, on real folios and charters.
Castilian Gothic and Albalá Handsc. 1200–1450Transcribe Castilian Gothic writing: letra de privilegios, letra de albalaes and codices, with their minim strings, contractions, era dates and ruedas.
Cortesana Court and Chancery Documentsc. 1400–1550Transcribe Spanish cortesana: the looped court hand of royal cédulas, chancery ejecutorias and notarial receipts, with its fused words and rúbricas.
Procesal and Procesal Encadenada Recordsc. 1500–1650Transcribe Spanish procesal and procesal encadenada: chained notarial and court writing, with its lost word breaks, legal contractions, numerals and rúbricas.
Spanish Colonial Humanistic and Mixed Handsc. 1550–1800Transcribe the documents of the Spanish Indies: viceregal letters, cabildo books, parish and mission papers in mixed humanistic, cortesana and procesal hands.
Transcribing Spanish across the centuries
What survives is unusually deep and unusually administrative. Monastic and cathedral archives keep charters from the ninth century onwards; the royal chanceries left privileges, cédulas and the bound ejecutorias of the Chancillerías; notaries bound their acts into protocol books that still fill provincial archives; parishes kept baptisms and burials from the 1530s; and the Council of the Indies gathered the paperwork of an empire reaching from Michoacán to the Philippines.
The hands change with the institutions. Visigothic minuscule, written across the peninsula until the twelfth century, gives way to Gothic book and documentary scripts, and those to the letra de albalaes of the Alfonsine chancery. Cortesana loops its way through the fifteenth century, procesal stretches it into chains the crown legislated against, and by the seventeenth century the round humanistic hands of the colegios compete with all of them, in Seville and Lima alike.
The readers of this material are archivists cataloguing series, editors of cartularies and documentary collections, genealogists working through notarial and parish books, and linguists tracking a spelling across dated documents. All of them want the same thing from a transcription: the scribe’s own letters, expansions that are visible as expansions, and numbers and dates that have not been quietly tidied.
Not sure which hand you have?
Upload a page, pick the closest domain, and test the prompt on one page before running the rest. You can switch domains at any time.