Guidonian hand
In Medieval music, the Guidonian hand was a mnemonic device used to assist singers in learning to sight-sing. Some form of the device may have been used by Guido of Arezzo, a medieval music theorist who wrote a number of treatises, including one instructing singers in sightreading. The hand occurs in some manuscripts before Guido's time as a tool to find the semitone; it does not have the depicted form until the 12th century. Sigebertus Gemblacensis in 1105–10 did describe Guido using the joints of the hand to aid in teaching his hexachord. The Guidonian hand is closely linked with Guido's new ideas about how to learn music, including the use of hexachords, and the first known Western use of solfege.
Chancery hand
The English chancery hand was already an arcane specialty by the time of the Restoration. Samuel Pepys recorded (Thursday 12 July 1660):
The later "cancelleresca corsiva" ("cursive chancery hand"), often called "Chancery Cursive", developed from Humanist minuscule, itself the progeny of Carolingian minuscule, in the mid-fifteenth century as "a cursive form of the humanistic minuscule". In England and France at the time it was known as "Italic". In English it is often changed in spelling to "cancellaresca corsiva". The Italian scribe Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi's 1522 influential pamphlet on handwriting called "La Operina" was the first book on writing the italic script known as cursive chancery hand. He was a scribe in the Papal Curia, which had refined cursive chancery hand in its infancy during the latter half of the fifteenth century. While considered a cursive, this "papal hand" was "strongly disciplined in form, regular in movement and slightly, if at all, inclined from the perpendicular."