You know that years in the SCA have warped your definition of the word "useful" when...

[jducoeur]

... you have the reaction of "that's the most useful new site I've seen in months!" when you come across the Latin 1086 - 1733 For Beginners page.

I have no idea whether it's a good tutorial yet -- I just got the link from sca_today. My suspicion is that it is focused on a subset of the language (official documents), so it's only a start. But it's the first introductory course I've come across that is specifically for *period* texts, rather than classical ones. And given that most of the latin sources I really care about are 16th and 17th century, that's rather interesting...

Comments

[cheshyre]

Did you notice they also have a site on reading/deciphering period Secretary hand?

[jducoeur]

Hadn't come across that. I *can* pretty much read Secretary hand (enough years of looking at the output of Anton et al, I think), although it's fairly slow going. It helps that I'm completely comfortable with Elizabethan English to begin with, so I'm expecting the right grammatical constructs...

[cheshyre]

Palaeography tutorial.

I was recently reading Her majesty's spymaster (about Walsingham), and it discussed the ciphers of the time and codebreaking methods.

Growing up, I used to be a whiz at the cryptogram puzzles in Games magazine, and then I thought about the lack of standardized spelling in Elizabethan English and became much more impressed with the efforts of Phillipes and others...