"After that last burst of clarity, once literacy spreads beyond professional scribes to ordinary readers like you and me, manuscript writing becomes distorted and stretched out by the very difficult-to-read early modern cursive script of the 15th to 17th century, " he said.

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Then a few years ago, Alice was writing her memoirs and asks Nina to comment on the manuscript.

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Dr Rugg and his team are now writing software to create dozens of tables and grilles in an attempt to reproduce other linguistic patterns in the manuscript.

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