The Healer's Trap
How folk medicine became a path to the stake in the Lorraine witch trials
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Teaching Machines to Read
In ProgressWhat AI agents' learning processes reveal about the cognitive demands of reading early modern handwriting.
This is from a 1620s recipe book written in English secretary hand — the standard handwriting of early modern England. Can you read it?
· · · · For the pyles · · · ·
Take one handefull of mollet leaues, and wrappe them in a Colewort
leafe, and rake them in the Imbers vntill they bee well rosted
then take them, and put awaye the Coleworte leafe, and grinde
Long s
The tall letter that looks like an "f" without the crossbar is actually a long s. "pyles" = piles, "leaues" = leaves.
Secretary d
The letter that loops back to the left is a secretary d — it looks nothing like a modern d. See "handefull" and "and".
Imbers
"Imbers" means embers — you're wrapping mallow leaves in a cabbage leaf and roasting them in the coals. This is a recipe for treating hemorrhoids.
The AI read this at 3.80% CER in its best run — with zero training data. Transkribus achieves ~3% but requires 2,500+ pages of hand-labeled ground truth.
From the project Teaching Machines to Read An ongoing experiment in AI paleography — can Claude learn to read 400-year-old handwriting the way a student would? Read more All Projects