A 1477 Valentine Just Became Easier to Read, Thanks to A.I.
A handwritten love letter from 1477 — long considered the earliest surviving Valentine in English — has been translated with help from artificial intelligence. MyHeritage’s Scribe A.I. which launched this spring, analyzed the note that Margery Brews sent to John Paston and returned not only a readable version of the text, but also historical context, key details, and suggestions for further research.
The letter comes from the Paston letters, a celebrated archive of more than 1,000 letters, documents, and business records dating from 1422 to 1509. The British Library owns the collection and occasionally exhibits it, offering a rare window into the lives of England’s landed gentry before the Tudor period. Scholars have studied the archive since antiquarian John Fenn first published it in 1787.
Scribe A.I. is designed to help users work through handwritten material without needing to decipher difficult scripts or archaic language on their own. According to MyHeritage, the tool can process handwriting in several languages, including German and French, and generate a transcript alongside contextual notes and follow-up research prompts. In this case, it produced a Middle English rendering of Brews’s letter, making the text far more accessible to non-specialists.
The content of the letter is as revealing as its survival. Brews writes with affection, but also with a clear awareness of the family pressures surrounding the match. Her father believed she could do better, while Paston’s family wanted a larger dowry. Brews’s mother was involved as well. “But if that you love me, as I trust truly that you do, you will not leave me therefore,” she wrote, adding that even if Paston had less wealth, she would not forsake him. The couple married that autumn.
The project sits within a broader wave of A.I.-assisted scholarship. Similar tools are being used to study ancient texts and damaged records, including the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Herculaneum Scrolls, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. In that sense, the Paston letter is more than a romantic relic. It is also a reminder that machine learning is increasingly becoming part of the historian’s toolkit, opening fragile archives to a wider public while preserving the labor of close reading for the moments that matter most.
