You already read Latin. What you have never done is read it in a ninth-century hand — and that is a separate skill, closer to learning someone's handwriting than to learning a language.

This is Caroline minuscule, the script Charlemagne's schools standardised around the year 800, and the easiest medieval hand there is. You have a head start: the humanists of the fifteenth century mistook it for Roman writing and copied it, and their copy became roman type. The letters on your screen now are its descendants.

This track asks you to learn the letters and nothing else. The manuscript is full of abbreviations, but the editors wrote every one of them out, so what you read here is plain Latin in an old hand. The signs themselves wait for you in Latin II.

⚠ That has one consequence worth knowing before it puzzles you. Because the editors resolved everything, the ink contains marks you will not find anywhere in the printed line. You are not missing something and the transcription is not wrong — the two simply do not correspond letter for letter. The commonest are:

& — e and t written as one, and it works inside a word: the ink reads ſupl& where the print says suplet.
a stroke over a vowel for a missing m or n — nō is non, and the print simply says non.
ſca, ē and their kind — contracted words written out in full in the print (sancta, est).
ę, the e with a little tail, which is how the Middle Ages wrote ae.
¬ at a line's end, where a word breaks and continues on the next line.

When a line contains one of these, it is explained underneath.

⚑ And one thing that will trip you more than any letterform: the spaces. Ancient books had none at all, and by the ninth century word division is still only half done. Short words cling to their neighbours and gaps open inside long ones — the ink on one of these very lines reads quarequomodolongitudinem for Quare quomodo longitudinem. Do not trust the gaps. Find a word you know inside the run of letters and let the rest fall out; it is the Latin that divides the line, not the spacing.

One thing about these pictures. Every line here is cut from a real page, and a real page is crowded — lines above and below crowd in, and a decorated capital may loom beside them. So the line you are working on is left in focus and everything else is softened. The soft material is really there on the parchment; it is not a bad scan, and it is not being hidden from you. It is out of focus so your eye knows where to sit.

The same line, twice