11/10: a new (old) kind of reading

In my Vulgate class this semester the students are learning to read the Latin text of the Bible directly from manuscript leaves written in the Middle Ages. This is quite a challenge because on some leaves the writing is so small that there are 12 lines of text per vertical inch (!) and because nearly every other word is abbreviated in some way. Punctuation is scarce and unreliable. Knowing Latin doesn't guarantee the ability to read this Latin. But today my students worked solely from the manuscript leaf in class (digitally projected so we could all see it); no notes and no cleaned-up, laser-printed version of the text to compare it with. And they did it. Here's the leaf we used today: