The handwriting is pretty sloppy on at least the first few pages from what I see. A lot of the letters become so small that they're little more than bumps on a line. Being in cursive certainly doesn't help either. Some of the words use alternate spellings which makes them a little more difficult to recognize.
But really, cursive is optimized for reducing the possibility of failure (inkblots) on primitive quill pens, not for readability. Even the best most precise cursive tends to be more difficult to read than modestly competent print.
Even the best most precise cursive tends to be more difficult to read than modestly competent print.
That's purely a practice effect, like the fake finding that lowercase text is easier to read than all-caps text. (People you pull off the street do indeed read lowercase text faster. After a minor amount of practice, this advantage disappears.)
There are a lot of cases here where a series of letters appears to have been reduced to just a wave pattern. But the biggest problems I have at first glance are
- You can't zoom in far enough
- Some letters are written in an unexpected (consistent, but not modern) way. Look at how e is always written like you'd expect a cursive o or a σ to look. This difficulty will be easily overcome if you spend any time reading the text, but as of now I have a lot more trouble identifying what letters have been written than identifying what word a sequence of known letters is supposed to represent.
On the other hand, a lot of it looks perfectly fine. "This occasioned much discourse of the cause of Fountaines, and Dr Robinson was of opinion that (stormes?) occasiond by a subterraneall heat, either of fire or" (eighth bullet point at the beginning of 1686).
Comments
The handwriting is pretty sloppy on at least the first few pages from what I see. A lot of the letters become so small that they're little more than bumps on a line. Being in cursive certainly doesn't help either. Some of the words use alternate spellings which makes them a little more difficult to recognize.
But really, cursive is optimized for reducing the possibility of failure (inkblots) on primitive quill pens, not for readability. Even the best most precise cursive tends to be more difficult to read than modestly competent print.
That's purely a practice effect, like the fake finding that lowercase text is easier to read than all-caps text. (People you pull off the street do indeed read lowercase text faster. After a minor amount of practice, this advantage disappears.)
There are a lot of cases here where a series of letters appears to have been reduced to just a wave pattern. But the biggest problems I have at first glance are
- You can't zoom in far enough
- Some letters are written in an unexpected (consistent, but not modern) way. Look at how e is always written like you'd expect a cursive o or a σ to look. This difficulty will be easily overcome if you spend any time reading the text, but as of now I have a lot more trouble identifying what letters have been written than identifying what word a sequence of known letters is supposed to represent.
On the other hand, a lot of it looks perfectly fine. "This occasioned much discourse of the cause of Fountaines, and Dr Robinson was of opinion that (stormes?) occasiond by a subterraneall heat, either of fire or" (eighth bullet point at the beginning of 1686).