The reason why a document-specific alphabet is more helpful than a generic paleography chart: Take a single clear line of text and choose a word that you feel confident about identifying (e.g., a repeated name, date, title, or common phrase). Transcribe all of the visible letters, including odd loops, exaggerated descenders, shortened letters, and slanted letters. This process will create an alphabet based on the actual scribal hand, rather than an idealized scribal hand from a different document.
Paleography charts are great for demonstrating all the different forms a letter can take throughout history, but they typically include letters from multiple time periods, places, and scribal hands. A chart might only show one type of r or long s, when your document features several varieties. It can be confusing for a novice to see a “correct” letter form in their document and think that they are wrong because it curves, connects, or terminates differently from the version shown in a chart.
A document-specific alphabet is built upon repeated evidence. Once you have written down a likely letter, search the page for other instances of that letter shape in other words. Compare how it sits on the baseline, how its ascender or descender is formed, and how it links with adjacent letters. Three examples of the same letter are much more convincing than one that just looks like the version in a printed chart. Repeated examples also make it easier to distinguish between a real letter and ink stains, flourishes, or stray marks.
Don’t hold off creating your own alphabet until you’ve identified every single letter in the manuscript. Mark unknown letters with a question mark and keep them visible so you can easily refer back to them. There may be multiple options for e, s, or a string of minims. Go back and edit those forms as you learn more about the letters in the document. Your document-specific alphabet should represent the letters that you are currently confident about, rather than implying that there is only one right answer for each character.
Additionally, you’ll want to include common letter combinations, not just individual letters. There could be a letter form that only appears at the start of a word, before a specific vowel, or in a common ligature. By copying the entire word or combination, you preserve the full context of the letter, whereas if you transcribe it alone, that information is lost. Likewise, make sure to record contractions or superscripts, making sure to differentiate between the written abbreviation and its proposed expansion.
After a few lines, you should find yourself with an alphabet that includes fewer and fewer completely unfamiliar letterforms. The ultimate sign of improvement isn’t that you can suddenly read every word, but rather that you’re able to look at an obscure letter, find similar letterforms in other parts of the manuscript, and make a reasoned argument about which reading is most likely to be correct.
