Abbreviations in Medieval Latin Handwriting

Abbreviations were used extensively in medieval Latin manuscripts. One reason for this was to allow economical use of parchment or other kinds of writing materials, which were relatively expensive during the Middle Ages. This article elaborates on the employment of abbreviations in medieval Latin handwriting and how they can be extracted from digitized documents with the support of an imageprocessing software system. The main objective of extraction is to characterize different writing hands. According to our research hypothesis, abbreviations reveal a great deal about specific scribes. As a first step, the stability of this criterion is analyzed. As it turns out, a similar amount of abbreviations and a similar distribution regarding their positions within individual words can be found for the same copyist.