Mabillon Defends a Forged Charter and Founds a Discipline

Palaeography classifies historical handwriting by letterform, the sequence of pen strokes that produced it and regional scribal convention, building a comparative record detailed enough that an undated, unsigned manuscript's hand alone can place it within a specific period and region. The Benedictine monk Jean Mabillon founded the discipline with his 1681 treatise De re diplomatica, written to defend the authenticity of monastic charters that a Jesuit critic had dismissed as forgeries, in which Mabillon set out the first systematic criteria for distinguishing a genuine medieval hand from a later imitation, turning what had been connoisseurship into a repeatable method.

Dating a scripture manuscript by its script is frequently the only evidence available when a colophon is missing, illegible or was never present, and palaeography routinely narrows a manuscript's date to within a few decades using nothing but the shape of its letters, evidence that survives independently of any claim the manuscript's own scribe or a later tradition makes about its age. The atlas relies on palaeographic dating wherever a sacred text's antiquity is central to its claimed authority and no other independent dating evidence exists.