Typophile

References for Renaissance and New Latin Breviographs and Scribal Abbreviations

BewareofDoug

Can anyone assist with some online references (scans of books are fine if that's what's available) regarding the Latin scribal abbreviations and typographic breviographs of the 16th to 18th C.? I have found references for the scribal abbreviations of the early medieval period, though not particularly detailed ones, and the typographic usages in the 16th C. were very significant and not always the same at all. For example the use of a macron over a terminal u to signify um or a symbol similar to a q; to indicate que.

For an example of the types of works, see the scan on the right for this page of Heinrich Agrippa's De Nobilitate et Praecellentia Foeminei Sexus or the same with respect to this page from Thomas More's Vtopia

Ideally, I'd like to find a reference that goes into great detail as to all the variations. In a pinch I'd take titles of books I might be able to find through a brick and mortar library or even order online, but I expect there are references that just aren't coming up in my searches.

English references would be preferable, but German or French would be better than nothing.

Gruß,
Doug

John Hudson

The standard work for palaeographic document study is Adriano Cappelli's Dizianario di Abbreviature Latine et Italiane and, for English documents, The Record Interpreter by Charles Trice-Martin. But these both deal with manuscript abbreviations, rather than typographic, and are illustrated by written forms.

There is an electronic reference, based on Cappelli, if I recall correctly, but expanded and using blackletter type. It is called Abbreviationes. It used to be available as a Mac app, but now seems to be in more formats. There is a license fee.

Andreas Stötzner

You may also want to look into the MUFI character recommendation available online here. It deals with many Latin abbreviations in typography. MUFI was responsible for encoding a number of them in the A720-block of the Unicode standard.

Riccardo Sartori

Related?
http://typophile.com/node/21017

John Savard

Some information on this is at:
http://www.ndl.go.jp/incunabula/e/glossary/glo_11.html

and here:
http://www.menota.org/guidelines/ch6/abbreviations_1-1.html

there are brief mentions here:
http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/1/000027/000027.html
http://daedalus.umkc.edu/incunables/index.html

Captured from web.archive.org on 1 Nov 2011. view this capture