Palaeography acquired its name with the publication in 1708 of Palaeographia Graeca by the Maurist Bernard de Montfaucon, a book that dealt so comprehensively with the handwriting and other characteristics of Greek manuscripts that it remained the leading authority on the subject for almost two centuries. The decisive move towards the systematic study of the handwriting of Latin manuscripts had been made somewhat earlier, in 1681, when Jean Mabillon, Montfaucon's older friend and fellow Benedictine, included in Book V of his De re diplomatica samples of Latin scripts from the fourth to the fifteenth century, arranged by type of script and century, and so began to reduce the material to order. But whereas Mabillon had seen ‘Gothica’, ‘Langobardica’, ‘Saxonica’, and ‘Francogallica’ in isolation from one another as national scripts of the Germanic peoples and set them apart from Roman handwriting, it was Scipione Maffei of Verona who recognised that the so-called national scripts were in fact no more than later developments of Roman script. Maffei's division of Latin scripts into majuscule, minuscule, and cursive could have been the most productive point of departure for a genetic history of writing, but though his thesis was accepted in principle, the outstanding palaeographical achievement of the eighteenth century consisted in the diligent collection of all known varieties of Latin handwriting and their arrangement according to a system. This task was accomplished by the Maurist Benedictines Dom Toustain and Dom Tassin in their Nouveau Traité de Diplomatique (Paris 1750—65, especially Vol. 3).