From the book Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus (A Description of the Northern Peoples), available on Google Books:

enter image description here What are the two highlighted letters in unicode?

What typeface is this? Maybe Antiqua?

  • 2
    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because I don't think identification of random typefaces is on-topic here. – muru Dec 3 '19 at 2:28
  • I'm voting to leave open because this is a question about the appreciation of literature. (If it was just "what typeface is this", I might be inclined to agree with muru, but I think it's also "what are these letters", which is no more off-topic than many meaning questions.) – Rand al'Thor Dec 3 '19 at 6:16
  • If this Q is deemed off-topic here, it could be migrated to GD.SE. Though the question might need an edit to follow our font-identification guidelines, specifically mentioning which tools were used to attempt to ID the font. – curious Dec 4 '19 at 16:47

The first one is a common abbreviation: q; stands for que in this case. A screenshot from Cappelli:

enter image description here

The other one is a ligature: what you see is simply ct with a little arc connecting the letters.

I don't know whether these exist in Unicode, nor do I know about type faces.

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  • 5
    A small amount of research indicates that there is no "ct" ligature in Unicode, nor is there any plan to add new ligatures. Existing ligatures are for compatibility reasons with other character sets. You need a font that does glyph substitution to see these non-coded ligatures. forum.high-logic.com/viewtopic.php?t=2290 – CJ Dennis Dec 1 '19 at 22:52

The typeface appears similar to those by Nicolas Jenson, a 15th-century typographer.

The original typeface may not have a name (or the name may be lost to time), but there is a 21st-century typographer named Gilles Le Corre (GLC) who creates fonts that replicate 15th- and 16th-century typefaces.

None of GLC's typefaces matches this one exactly, but several of them are quite close.

  • 1470 Jenson Latin Bold has a Q with the same long tail, lowercase e with slanted crossbar, and ct ligature, but its -que ligature is different. Also, you can't get the -que ligature without the in- and -us ligatures, as seen in this sample.

    1470 Jenson Latin Bold

  • 1529 Champ Fleury Pro has a Q with a shorter tail and is a little more angular than Jenson Latin. The lowercase e has a slanted crossbar, and the ct ligatures is used by default, but the ae and interior s ligatures require typing a special character. It doesn't appear to have a -que ligature.

    1529 Champ Fleury Pro

  • 1543 Humane Jenson Bold has a slightly shorter Q-tail than Jenson Latin. It also has the slanted-crossbar e, but doesn't use the ligatures by default. The ct and que ligatures are actually occupying the slots of dagger and double-dagger, and the que ligature has a diacritical.

    1543 Humane Jenson Bold

  • 1543 Humane Petreius has a short Q-tail, but a slanted e-crossbar, a ct ligature, and a lovely que ligature (in the double-dagger slot).

    1543 Humane Petreius

Yes, this question is off-topic and will probably get closed. I have no vested interest in the MyFonts website.

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