What does a hyphen look like in the Estoria manuscripts?

The hyphens you will see in the Estoria manuscripts do not look like modern hyphens. Nowadays we are used to seeing a horizontal dash, like this - . In many medieval manuscripts hyphens appear as very faint diagonal lines. How easy they are to see depends on the quality of the images. Sometimes it can be easier to see hyphens in black and white images. Here are two examples from the manuscript called E:

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There is a tiny, faint diagonal line after the 'xⁱa' on the top line. This is a hyphen. It could easily be confused with a mark on the paper if you did not know what you were looking for.

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This one is clearer. It comes after the 'cō'. It is important not to confuse the abbreviation mark, the little macron (the line) over the letter 'o' with a hyphen. The hyphen is the diagonal line after the 'ō', while the macron shows us we have a letter (or letters) missing. This is something we will cover later in the course.

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This example is from the T manuscript, and you can see hyphens after the top two lines shown here. These images are not quite as sharp as those from E, so you can see it is slightly harder to spot those little hyphens, but they are there.

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As this example from Q is in colour, you can see it is slightly harder to spot the macron. If you look carefully after the 'es' you can see the hyphen. You will also notice that the 's' is a long s, rather than the shape we usually use today.

If you are struggling to spot hyphens, a trick for new transcribers is every time a word is split over two lines you should look twice to see if that little hyphen is there or not.

When transcribing, you will notice that sometimes you need hyphens all the time and sometimes you might go for a few folios (or more) without seeing any hyphens at all. This is all down to the particular scribal practice of the individual scribe who wrote out the folio you happen to be working on. Often, many scribes would work on the same manuscript, and each one would have their own little quirks, like we all do today in our handwriting or our use of language. You should not be worried if you think you have not needed to use the hyphen tag for a while. You should only use the hyphen tag when you see a hyphen. It may just be that you have hit a patch of folios copied by a scribe who didn't use many hyphens!