Capelli

The elements of abbreviation in medieval Latin paleography

BY A D R I A N O CAPPELLI

Translated by David Heimann and Richard Kay

UNIVERSITY

OF

KANSAS LIBRARIES,

1982

University of Kansas Publications Library Series, 47

The elements of abbreviation in medieval Latin paleography

BY ADRIANO CAPPELLI Translated by David Heimann and Richard Kay

UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS LIBRARIES, 1 9 8 2

Printed in Lawrence, Kansas, U.S.A. by the University of Kansas Printing Service

PREFACE

Take a foreign language, write it in an unfamiliar script, abbreviating every third word, and you have the compound puzzle that is the medieval Latin manuscript. For over two generations, paleographers have taken as their vade mecum in the decipherment of this abbreviated Latin the Lexicon abbreviaturarum compiled by Adriano Cappelli for the series "Manuali Hoepli" in 1899. The perennial value of this work undoubtedly lies in the alphabetic list of some 14,000 abbreviated forms that comprises the bulk of the work, but all too often the beginner slavishly looks up in this dictionary every abbreviation he encounters, when in nine cases out of ten he could ascertain the meaning by applying a few simple rules. That he does not do so is simply a matter of practical convenience, for the entries in the Lexicon are intelligible to all who read Latin, while the general principles of Latin abbreviation are less easily accessible for rapid consultation, at least for the American student. No doubt somewhere in his notes there is an out­ line of these rules derived from lectures or reading, but even if the notes are at hand they are apt to be sketchy; for reference he would rather rely on the lengthier accounts available in manuals of paleography, but more often than not he has only Cappelli's dictionary at his elbow. This

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does indeed devote forty-six introductory pages to "Brachigrafia Medioevale," but because this essay is in Italian, our Latinist almost invariably...