How is cortesana different from procesal?

Cortesana is rounder and still legible word by word, with looped ascenders and moderate joining. Procesal, which grows out of it after about 1500, compresses the letters, lengthens the joins and can run whole lines together; the extreme form, procesal encadenada, is treated on its own page here.

Can the royal signature and its rúbrica be separated from the text?

Yes. Yo el Rey, Yo la Reyna, the secretary’s Por mandado clause and the flourish itself are returned as a labelled block at the end, with the flourish described rather than transcribed, so the body of the document is not polluted by invented words.

What happens to words that are joined together?

They are divided as an editor would divide them, using the formulae of the document type, and the transcription notes where the division is a judgement rather than something the scribe marked. You can also ask for the text exactly as written, without spaces added.

Are maravedí sums converted into modern figures?

Only if you ask. The default keeps the Roman numerals and the U of thousands as they stand, since that is what a diplomatic edition needs; a converted figure can be supplied beside each sum for checking against an account book.

Can a whole bound ejecutoria be transcribed consistently?

Yes, and consistency is the point: the same expansion rules, the same treatment of names and the same folio references across every leaf. Run the first few leaves, settle the conventions on them, and apply the same instructions to the rest of the volume.

Spanish · c. 1400–1550

Read the looped court hand of the Castilian chanceries

Cortesana curls every ascender and descender back on itself and carries the pen through whole phrases without lifting it, so de la dicha çibdad can arrive as one long shape and the rúbrica under a royal signature looks like another line of words. Evidano transcribes cédulas, ejecutorias, capitulations and notarial receipts in this hand, separates the signature and the marginal registration from the body, and leaves the contractions standing if that is what your edition needs.

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Sample pages

A parchment sheet covered with about twenty lines of large, round, looped fifteenth-century Spanish writing. — Sample 1. Receipt given at Burgos on 12 August 1490 in the name of Diego Gómez de Sandoval, acknowledging 135,000 maravedís paid by García de Bustamante on behalf of Diego Hurtado de Mendoza towards the agreed price of the town of Ayora, from the municipal archive there. The hand is a large, unhurried cortesana: conosco yo don Diego opens the sheet, ascenders loop forward across the words that follow, and the sum is spelled out with mrs contracted.

A paper folio filled with dense looped chancery writing, with line numbers pencilled down the left margin. — Sample 2. The first page of the contemporary copy of Columbus’s letter announcing the discovery, kept in the royal archive at Simancas; the note at the head reads Estado, leg. 1-2º, fol. 164, and the numbers down the margin were added by a later editor. The copyist writes a small, quick cortesana in which vuestras altezas, señor and dellas are contracted, and the ends of the lines dissolve into loops.

A parchment sheet headed by a line of tall decorated capitals above many lines of small chancery writing. — Sample 3. The first sheet of the codicil Isabella of Castile granted at Medina del Campo on 23 November 1504, three days before her death, drawn up by her secretary Gaspar de Gricio and now in the Biblioteca Nacional de España. The invocation In nomine sancte et individue trinitatis is written in tall decorated capitals; under it the queen’s titles run on for six lines of small cortesana, and each new clause is announced by OTROSÍ in display letters.

The upper part of a parchment page filled with narrow, heavily abbreviated chancery lines. — Sample 4. Part of a page from the carta ejecutoria won by the half-brothers Sancho de Almazán and Juan de la Cámara against the council of Arenas, issued by Queen Joanna’s chancery at Valladolid in 1514 and now in the Boston Public Library. The scribe writes a compressed chancery hand in which the recurring words of the suit are all contracted — dhõ for dicho, dhã for dicha, cõpeliese, abdiẽça — while the sentences keep the long relative clauses of court style.

What cortesana looks like and where it was used

Cortesana is the writing Castilian officialdom settled into once the albalaes cursive had loosened. From the last quarter of the fourteenth century the letters grow rounder, ascenders and descenders curl into closed loops, and the pen leaves the page less and less; by the reign of the Catholic Monarchs almost every royal secretary, council scribe and notary in the peninsula wrote it. It served the whole apparatus of government — cédulas and provisiones on paper, privileges and cartas ejecutorias on parchment, capitulations, receipts, protocols of sale and dowry — and it went with the administration to Granada in 1492 and across the Atlantic soon afterwards. Around the middle of the sixteenth century the courts pushed it aside in favour of the faster, tighter procesal.

The script is small, wide and round. The b, l, h and d carry looped ascenders that lean forward over the letters that follow; g, y, q and long ſ drop loops that tangle with the line beneath; e is often a closed circle finished with a hairline, and the two forms of s alternate by position. Because the pen stays down, de, del, que, dicho and the endings of names fuse into single shapes that have to be divided by sense rather than by eye. The contraction system is inherited from the medieval hands but used harder: dho for dicho, mrs for maravedís, Vra Alteza and Sus Altezas, Rl for real, xpiano for cristiano, and superscript o and a closing ordinals and names.

Much of the page is not running text at all. A royal cédula opens with El Rey, or El Rey e la Reyna, on a line of its own, states its business in a paragraph or two and closes with Yo el Rey, a secretary’s Por mandado del rey and a flourished rúbrica. A provisión begins with the full string of royal titles; a chancery ejecutoria is a bound parchment book whose first leaf is illuminated and whose text then runs on for dozens of dense pages. Sums are Roman numerals with the U that marks thousands of maravedís, dates are given by the año del nascimiento, and the margins carry registration notes, chancellors’ marks, later archival numbers and, in famous documents, line numbers added by nineteenth-century editors.

Why ordinary OCR struggles here

Loops that belong to another line

Ascenders from the line below and descenders from the line above cross the writing, so any page carries three layers of strokes at once. Segmentation designed for print joins the wrong halves together and reports letters where only the tail of a neighbouring word passes through.

Words that never end

The pen runs unbroken through de la dicha, por quanto and que le sea, and the same phrases are contracted so hard that the boundaries have to be settled by grammar rather than by white space. Engines that trust spacing return strings that are neither Spanish nor obvious nonsense, and those are the slowest kind of error to repair.

Signatures, rúbricas and registration marks

Yo el Rey, the secretary’s clause, the chancellor’s mark and the notary’s rúbrica are drawn rather than written. Treated as text they generate invented words; ignored altogether, the transcription loses the very marks that make the document authentic.

Money and dates inside the prose

Maravedí sums run into the sentence as Roman numerals with the U of thousands and the sign for a cuento, and in a receipt or an account they are the part that matters. A rent, a price or a year can be wrong while the surrounding sentence still reads perfectly well.

Who works with this material

Archives holding chancery series

Simancas, the Real Chancillerías of Valladolid and Granada and the municipal archives keep kilometres of this writing. Reference staff need a text they can index by person, place and date so that a researcher’s request can be answered without opening every bundle.

Genealogists working on hidalguía suits

An ejecutoria names parents, grandparents, witnesses and neighbours, and repeats them over dozens of leaves. What matters is that every name and place is caught, spelled as the scribe spelled it, and tied to the folio where it appears.

Historians of the early Atlantic world

Capitulations, instructions, licences and the letters that went with them survive as chancery copies in this hand. Reading them beside the printed editions of the nineteenth century shows where an editor normalised, guessed or silently mended a passage.

Economic historians in notarial protocols

Sales, dowries, rents and apprenticeships are recorded in bound registers of receipts and contracts. A usable transcription has to keep the sums exactly, including the U of thousands, because the figures are the data and the formulae around them are not.

Getting the best transcription

Step 1

Name the document type before the page

Say whether you are sending a cédula, a provisión, an ejecutoria or a notarial instrument. The opening and closing formulae differ, and a model told what to expect will label the intitulatio, the dispositive clause and the subscription instead of running them together.

Step 2

Ask for signatures and margins as their own blocks

Request the body of the text, then the signature clause, the secretary’s line, the rúbricas and every marginal note separately, each with its position. That keeps the drawn marks out of the prose and preserves the registration notes that date the document’s passage through the chancery.

Step 3

Fix the contraction and numeral policy

Decide whether dho, mrs and Vra Alteza are to be expanded, and ask for maravedí sums to be given exactly as written, with a converted figure alongside rather than instead. Numbers are where a silent normalisation does the most damage.

Step 4

Test on a page with a sum and a signature

Pick the least tidy leaf you have, one that carries a total and a subscription, and check it fully before running a whole book. If the loops, the figure and the rúbrica come back correctly there, a long ejecutoria will hold up.

Frequently asked questions

How is cortesana different from procesal?: Cortesana is rounder and still legible word by word, with looped ascenders and moderate joining. Procesal, which grows out of it after about 1500, compresses the letters, lengthens the joins and can run whole lines together; the extreme form, procesal encadenada, is treated on its own page here.
Can the royal signature and its rúbrica be separated from the text?: Yes. Yo el Rey, Yo la Reyna, the secretary’s Por mandado clause and the flourish itself are returned as a labelled block at the end, with the flourish described rather than transcribed, so the body of the document is not polluted by invented words.
What happens to words that are joined together?: They are divided as an editor would divide them, using the formulae of the document type, and the transcription notes where the division is a judgement rather than something the scribe marked. You can also ask for the text exactly as written, without spaces added.
Are maravedí sums converted into modern figures?: Only if you ask. The default keeps the Roman numerals and the U of thousands as they stand, since that is what a diplomatic edition needs; a converted figure can be supplied beside each sum for checking against an account book.
Can a whole bound ejecutoria be transcribed consistently?: Yes, and consistency is the point: the same expansion rules, the same treatment of names and the same folio references across every leaf. Run the first few leaves, settle the conventions on them, and apply the same instructions to the rest of the volume.

Related scripts and pages

Castilian Gothic and Albalá Hands, c. 1200–1450The chancery cursive from which cortesana developed after 1380.Procesal and Procesal Encadenada Records, c. 1500–1650The compressed court hand that replaced cortesana in the law courts.Cortesão and Johannine Chancery Hands, c. 1385–1520The Portuguese chancery hand of the same generation.All Spanish hands and document typesEvery Spanish domain from Visigothic script to colonial mixed hands.Image to TextSearch all supported languages, scripts and document types.

Transcribe your cortesana chancery documents

Upload a cédula, an ejecutoria or a notarial register, choose Cortesana Court and Chancery Documents, and settle the conventions on one leaf before the volume follows.

Read the looped court hand of the Castilian chanceries

Sample pages

Evidano Transcription

Evidano Transcription

Evidano Transcription

Evidano Transcription

What cortesana looks like and where it was used

Why ordinary OCR struggles here

Loops that belong to another line

Words that never end

Signatures, rúbricas and registration marks

Money and dates inside the prose

Who works with this material

Archives holding chancery series

Genealogists working on hidalguía suits

Historians of the early Atlantic world

Economic historians in notarial protocols

Getting the best transcription

Name the document type before the page

Ask for signatures and margins as their own blocks

Fix the contraction and numeral policy

Test on a page with a sum and a signature

Further reading on this hand

Frequently asked questions

Related scripts and pages

Transcribe your cortesana chancery documents

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