The project

The Exeter Book Hand is an independent project by Ruby Ku, type designer, with the aim of encouraging the study and appreciation of Exeter MS 3501 — one of the great surviving codices of medieval English literature.

The project began as a font design exercise and expanded into a broader digital edition: a way to make the manuscript's scribal hand accessible to scholars, students, designers, and anyone curious about medieval England's literary heritage. Questions, corrections, and contributions are welcome.

FAQ

What is the Exeter Book?

Written around AD 970, the Exeter Book (Exeter Cathedral, MS 3501) is one of the four major surviving miscellanies of Old English poetry. It was donated to Exeter Cathedral by Leofric, Bishop of Exeter, sometime before 1072. Its contents range from religious narrative and saints' lives to elegies, gnomic verse, nearly 100 riddles, and the runic signatures of the poet Cynewulf.

What is the EBH font collection?

EBH (Exeter-Book Hand) is an open-source digital revival of the scribal hand of the Exeter Book manuscript. It comes in four styles: Facsimile, Alternates, Initials, and Runes — together covering the complete typographic range of the manuscript. A newer Alternates variant (EBH Alt 1.1) is also available with refined letterforms.

Can I use these fonts commercially?

Yes. The EBH fonts are released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, which permits free use in any context — personal, commercial, or academic — as well as modification and redistribution under the same license. You may not sell the fonts as standalone files.

How do I enable ligatures?

Most design applications (Adobe, Affinity, etc.) enable OpenType ligatures by default. In Microsoft Word, go to Format → Font → Advanced → Ligatures and enable Standard Ligatures. On the web, use font-feature-settings: "liga" 1, "fina" 1, "aalt" 1; in your CSS.

How do I type Old English characters?

Old English characters (þ, ð, æ, ƿ) are available on most systems: on macOS hold Option and press D for ð, and use the Character Viewer (Edit → Emoji & Symbols) for the rest. On Windows, use the Character Map or set up a custom keyboard layout. The EBH Facsimile page on this site includes a character inserter.

How does the word lookup work?

The interactive poem reader is backed by a database of 15,533 headword entries from the Dictionary of Old English wordforms corpus. When you click a word, the site identifies its headword and corpus frequency from the database. If the word is not in the corpus, the site queries the Claude AI model for a contextual definition — which is labelled as AI-generated.

How can I contribute?

Open an issue or pull request on the GitHub repository, or contact Ruby at info@exeterbookhand.com.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the Exeter Cathedral Library for custody of the manuscript and to the many scholars whose editions, translations, and commentaries make the Exeter Book accessible to new readers. The wordforms database derives from the Dictionary of Old English (University of Toronto), whose team have made an invaluable contribution to Old English studies.

Bibliography

• Bishop, T. A. M. English Caroline Minuscule. Oxford, 1971.
• Chambers, R. W., Max Förster, and Robin Flower, eds. The Exeter Book of Old English Poetry. London, 1933.
• Conner, Patrick W. Anglo-Saxon Exeter: A Tenth-Century Cultural History. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1993.
• Dumville, David N. "English Square Minuscule Script: The Mid-Century Phases." Anglo-Saxon England 23 (1994): 133–64.
• Hector, L. C. The Handwriting of English Documents. 2nd ed. London, 1966.
• Morison, Stanley. Politics and Script. Oxford, 1972.
• Parkes, M. B. English Cursive Hands 1250–1500. Oxford, 1969.
• Parkes, M. B. Scribes, Scripts and Readers. London, 1991.
• Reading, Anna. "Reading Anglo-Saxon Self Through the Vercelli Book." 2018.
• Robinson, P. R., and Rivkah Zim, eds. Of the Making of Books: Medieval Manuscripts, Their Scribes and Readers. Aldershot, 1997.