Lorenzo Hervas (1735–1809) and the account of the Japanese and Korean scripts in his Paleografía universal

The aim of the present paper is to introduce the little studied Paleografia universal of Lorenzo Hervas (1735–1809) and especially its chapter treating the Japanese and Korean scripts. While the manuscript nowadays kept at the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid (Mss. 8496–8498) was only finished in 1805, the chapter in question can be demonstrated to have already been written by 1798. Together with Joseph Hager’s well-known “Alphabet of Corea” (1800) Paleografia thus constitutes the earliest Western work to contain an actual specimen of han’gul, predating those by Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat and others by a number of years. Unlike Hager, Hervás even had an actual Korean print at his disposal, the original of which could be located in the Vatican library. Positioning Paleografìa in the history of Western studies of both Korean and Japanese, this paper will outline Hervás’s actual achievements and demonstrate in how far the flawed results can be reconciled with the author’s claims as to how they were arrived at. As will become clear, a correct understanding and decipherment of the Korean script was all but impossible from the beginning due to the paucity of available sources as well as erroneous and conflicting Western accounts of the Japanese syllabaries.