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This course has a fourfold aim: First, it is designed to familiarize participants with the basics of Latin paleography from Roman antiquity through the age of printing with moveable type; throughout, we will practice deciphering literary and documentary sources of various types, even as we concentrate on the evolution of different writing styles. Second, we will think about paleography’s status as a discipline. That is, the term “paleography” dates back to 1708 and Montfaucon’s classic work, Palaeographia Graeca. However, it was only in the late nineteenth century in the world of the German research university that paleography came into the orbit of the Geisteswissenschaften as a “Hilfswissenschaft.” Both implicitly and explicitly throughout the seminar we shall be asking what consequences that move entailed. Third, we will study the manner in which printing with moveable type changed western graphic culture: was printing revolutionary or evolutionary? Fourth, we will become familiar with certain aspects of “the history of the book,” discovering as we do what sorts of questions scholars in this broad field of scholarly endeavor have been asking recently.