Medieval Writing
Paleography Exercises
Mozarabic liturgy, 10th century (British Library, add. ms. 30844). All images by permission of the British Library.
This page comes from a 10th century liturgical work of offices and masses from Mozarabic Spain. This refers to the Christian communities that survived in the Muslim part of Spain after the Saracen invasions. The manuscript formerly belonged to the monastery of San Domingo at Silos. The script is Visigothic minuscule. The text of this page is Biblical, the description of the Annunciation, Luke 1:26-36, from the Latin Vulgate Bible.
The text of the Vulgate Bible can be obtained from Biblia Sacra Vulgata (1969), among other editions. There is a searchable version on the web at the Multi-lingual Bible site or a plain text version at Vulgate (Latin Bible) Index.. There is a detailed transcription of part of this page, and discussion of the script, in Brown (1990).

| overview | images | text | alphabet | abbreviations | ligatures | exercises |

| transcript | translation |

Click on each of the above to walk your way through the text. The transcript will appear in a separate window so that you can use it for reference at any time. These exercises are designed to guide you through the text, not test you, so you can cheat as much as you like.
Script sample for this example
Index of Exercises
Index of Scripts

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This site is created and maintained by Dr Dianne Tillotson, freelance researcher and compulsive multimedia and web author. Comments are welcome. Material on this web site is copyright, but some parts more so than others. Please check here for copyright status and usage before you start making free with it. This page last modified 23/4/2005.