Thanks to Stewart J. Brookes for coming to talk to us last night about Archetype, a dazzlingly rich and flexible tool for image-comparison, designed for palaeographers attempting to substantiate their claims about the dating and development of hands, but now being used to analyse (among other things) the making of the Bayeux Tapestry. The software can be freely downloaded and applied to any set of images you may happen to be grappling with.

We will be able to answer big questions with this. Personally, I’m still trying to answer a very small research question: who in the sixteenth/seventeenth century in England wrote ‘g’s like this?