The capacity to read and write are different abilities, yet while studies of medieval readers and reading have proliferated in recent years, there has so far been little examination of how people learnt to write in the middle ages - an aspect of literacy which this volume aims to address. The papers published here discuss evidence adduced from the -a sgraffio- writing of Ancient Rome, through the attempts of scribes to model their handwriting after that of the master-scribe in a disciplined scriptorium, to the repeated copying of set phrases in a Florentine merchant's day book. They show how...