A medieval-manuscript course that still warns you about Netscape 4, Internet Explorer 4 and the Flash 5 plugin is doing preservation work on two centuries at once.
Dr Dianne Tillotson built the site as an introduction to medieval manuscripts, paleography, script history, literacy and the culture surrounding the written word. It is not just a gallery of pretty pages. The point is to teach people how handwriting changed, how documents were made, what medieval writers actually wrote and how to begin decoding scripts that can look completely hostile to a modern reader.
The site says it has been counting visitors since October 24, 2000. It also retains the architecture of that era: frames, a no-frames alternative, a site map, JavaScript assumptions and interactive paleography exercises originally built around Flash.
The technology aged. The subject did not.
A serious educational site wearing old browser requirements
Tillotson’s writing is one of the reasons the project remains readable. She describes paleography as an “arcane art” without turning it into a performance of academic difficulty. Famous manuscripts sit beside scraps “discarded by history,” and the site treats both as useful evidence.
The resource ranges beyond letter forms. It discusses oral culture, manuscript production, writing systems and the fact that literacy in the Middle Ages represented a particular social world rather than a universal skill. A medieval church glossary and extensive site map push the project toward reference-library territory.
There is also a very specific layer of Web history embedded in the project. Tillotson notes image-permission arrangements with the British Library, National Archives and other institutions. She discusses upgrading old compressed graphics as bandwidth improved. She warns that copyright on manuscript photographs can outlive the manuscripts by several centuries. And she argues that the Web remains valuable for distributing educational material without putting everything behind a price tag.
That last point reads differently in 2026 than it did when the page was younger.
The site’s last listed modification is February 2016, but much of it remains readable because the information pages are ordinary HTML even where the old interactive machinery has become unreliable.
For researchers, the useful search surface is unusually dense: paleography, medieval manuscripts, Latin and vernacular scripts, literacy, manuscript photography, British Library reproductions and specific historical writing forms. For webmasters, it is a reminder that rich educational projects do not become useless just because their presentation layer gets old.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains many sites where the obsolete browser warning has become part of the artifact. Medieval Writing is better than most because the scholarship underneath still gives you a reason to stay.
And yes, the homepage still says you cannot do the paleography exercises on your iPad.