You can also find a professional, human-made transcription of the text here: www.esotericarchives.com/folger/v_b_2...
Here is Leo's attempt at transcribing the images, courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library. We're using this text as a benchmark to compare with the next version of our HTR model.
www.tryleo.ai/share/8e7922...
Bury a "ffroge" in a pot "full of Hooles" in an "antt hill" at a crossway, it instructs, for nine days. Then retrieve two bones from the pot, take the one that floats against a stream. Touch a woman and "she shall neuer rest till she hath bin with thee". To reverse, touch her with the other bone.
One section, entitled "Experimentum amorem, true & proued of manye" (p. 211), describes a method to attract or repel someone using the skeleton of a frog.
"The Book of Oberon" in particular contains detailed instructions for summoning spirits and geometric talismans intended to constrain celestial and infernal entities.
It's also a quintessential example of the wider "grimoire" tradition—textbooks containing instructions for enchanting objects, performing spells, invoking supernatural beings.
Hi Kevin! The optical character recognition (OCR) that makes typewritten PDFs searchable has long been powered by AI. What's changed is just that recent technical advancements ("Transformer" model architectures) are good enough to tackle harder problems such as historical handwriting.
Transcribed over 7,000 folios of eighteenth-century merchant letters with @leotranscribes.bsky.social. Now I just need to read them... 😅
We are pleased to share this grant from the @leotranscribes.bsky.social startup, issuing up to 100k credits for free documents transcriptions, all info here www.archivesportaleurope.net/blog/the-leo...
Or Leo! 🦁
Let us know how you get on Katherine :) Leo's model has been trained with early modernists in mind!
How has paperwork served as a tool of empowerment for people who often find power elusive?
In our latest podcast, a group of historians, archivists, and activists met at the Raphael Samuel History Centre (@rshc.bsky.social) to discuss the hidden history of paperwork 🗃️🎙️
"they shall see you take to husband, a French man & a Papist … [who] at the first sight gives occasion, to all the true religious to abhorr such a master, & consequently to deminish much of the hopefull loue they haue longe held to you" (4v-5r) 🏰
Enter Sir Philip Sidney. At just 25, he risked his career at court by sending Elizabeth a secret letter, warning her that the match would alienate her people and imperil her crown
Elizabeth, having restored the realm to the Protestant faith, was then considering marriage to Francis, Duke of Anjou, a Catholic prince. An alliance with France promised security, but many subjects feared it would endanger England’s Protestant identity & independence 🇫🇷⚔️
You can now share documents on Leo! To celebrate, here's a copy of a letter composed by Sir Philip Sidney in 1579 to Queen Elizabeth I, now held by the Folger Shakespeare Library 📜
www.tryleo.ai/share/833642...
Hi Jackie! You could try Leo, a new tool which is designed to provide more accurate transcripts for both 17th and 19th-century handwritten documents.
There's also Leo, a new entrant in the sphere of automated text recognition (ATR)! Our platform is designed to be more accurate, affordable, and intuitive to use than alternatives 🦁
I've been experimenting with Leo LLM-based transcriptions for a couple of months, and applied for this awesome grant. I got it (thanks, Jon!) and now I'm going to experiment some more. Will post some examples in this thread to give people an idea of how it works.
Have you tried Leo yet? It's designed to be more accurate than alternatives for this kind of material!
🚀 We’re offering up to 100,000 free credits (worth $15,000) for students, researchers, and archives to use Leo, our AI platform for transcribing historical documents. The only condition? You'll have to make the transcripts openly available (CC0) within 24 months.
blog.tryleo.ai/2025/09/05/l...
Hi Johnny, it sounds like there might be an issue with the image file. If you can reply / DM us with the image in question then we can ensure compatibility and fix this for you.
Try Leo! It will have no problem with this :)
@leotranscribes.bsky.social is really interesting: as far as I can tell, they trained a LLM in some way that’s way more reliable than chatbots. The result has been very good so far, and it doesn’t require specific models. It feels more like magic than Transkribus, but I’m generally impressed.
Hey Brett! In case you're still interested in automated text recognition, you could try Leo. It's designed to provide more accurate transcriptions for documents such as this.
Big news! 🦁 Leo won a $50,000 Emergent Ventures grant. We’re using it to boost accuracy, expand training data, add semantic search, and introduce translation, summarization, and interpretation tools for researchers. More details: blog.tryleo.ai/2025/08/06/l...
Hi Lisa. You might like to try Leo - it's designed to provide accurate transcriptions for documents like this straight out-of-the-box!
We'd be delighted if you considered adding Leo!
Hi Emily! Have you tried Leo? It works exceptionally well for modern English handwriting and may work better for this kind of material than other HTR services you have tried. You'll receive ten free credits upon signing up in case you'd like to try it out :)
"Google served up Transkribus and Pen-to-Print but neither worked for me. Somewhere in those results was Leo. It transcribed the first nine pages nearly perfectly and so I went ahead and transcribed the rest of the diary."
blog.tryleo.ai/2025/07/23/i...
