Abbreviationes – e-resource for Latin
We now have access to Abbreviationes, an electronic dictionary of medieval Latin abbreviations.
Who will use this? Anyone who works with medieval and Renaissance manuscripts as well as with early printed books.
Why would they need it? When copying Latin texts by hand, scribes habitually employed contracted versions of words to speed up reproduction. Early printed Latin books also frequently used the same abbreviations. These would have been familiar to contemporary readers, but they can make texts virtually undecipherable to the untrained modern eye. Abbrevationes provides the means to decode these texts.
How can it help? Abbrevationes is by far the largest resource of its kind. The database contains more than 70,000 entries taken from examples in manuscripts produced across Europe in the 8th to 15th centuries. It has tools for both basic search (when you just need to find a word or an abbreviation quickly) and advanced search (enabling sophisticated Boolean, case-sensitive and wildcard searching).
Where do I find it? On SAULCAT – choose Server 2 for the latest version.
How do I search it? It’s fairly intuitive to use, however this helpful guide explains the basics of search. Results are displayed as visualisations of the abbreviations along with the transcribed version and the corresponding complete word as well as a note of its first recorded use in a manuscript.
Contact us for more information: [email protected]