Scribal Attribution across Multiple Scripts: A Digitally Aided Approach

It is well known that people at many points in history wrote (and still write) using different scripts, alphabets, and writing systems. For most of the Middle Ages, scribes used different scripts for different purposes: the Insular script system included Half uncial, Cursive minuscule; the Gothic system included Textualis Libraria, Textualis Formata, Textualis Currens, and so on. This practice is by no means restricted to Latin writing, however: Tibetan scribes used the more formal dbu-can and more cursive dbu-med scripts in the same documents, for example. To consider other alphabets and writing systems, Sicily and the Iberian Peninsula both abound in documents and inscriptions combining Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew; documents from the SilkRoad, such as those found in theDunhuang caves, include Chinese, Tibetan, Sogdian, Uyghur, Syriac, Hebrew, Greek, and numerous Indic scripts; documents such as Codex Mendoza contain both Latin (Spanish) and Aztec writing systems alongside each other; and, even today, modern so-called foreign-look fonts for the Latin alphabet are designed to imitate Indic, Chinese, or otherwriting systems. This phenomenon of multigraphism, namely the use of different scripts, alphabets, or writing systems in the same time and place, has been studied in some detail in its social context, such as Greek and Hebrew and Greek and Egyptian; hiero-