Chapter 5
Scripts in the medieval era symbolized state power or religious authority. At first, the idea that a script could be political or the basis of judgment might seem absurd, but we make similar, if lower-stakes, associations between how letters are formed and the person forming them now. Consider how many perceive people who use the Comic Sans font or the hipster cool of Helvetica. European scripts, from the fall of Rome to the invention of the printing press, were not neutral; they carried great symbolic power.
The first medieval script was borrowed from Rome. The Romans wrote only in capitalis, whether on an obelisk, building, or scroll. The most famous example of this all-capital letter script is Trajan’s Column, with its symmetrical and geometric letters. Many consider it to be the most perfect alphabetic script.
The early Christians used Roman square capitals, also called capitalis, for their most important manuscripts. The only remaining manuscripts written in Roman square capitals are from Virgil manuscripts of the fourth and fifth century B.C.E. (We have many more examples on Roman columns and monuments.)1 The Christians quickly moved away from this script, though, because it was too expensive; Roman square capitals take up a lot of space on the page, and parchment was a valuable commodity, one that did not last long in humid Italy. So they developed a more concentrated script, capitalis rustica, that squeezed each letter. It was a skinny version of capitalis, and was con-sidered a way to save both stone and parchment. Like capitalis, from which the term “capital letters” comes, all rustica letters were capitals.*
Rustica was used from the first to the ninth century, and most frequently in the fourth and fifth centuries; about fifty such manuscripts have survived. It was written in the exact same way, with identical curves and the letters thinned to precisely the same size. So exact was the writing that it is hard to distinguish a first-century rustica manuscript from one in the fourth century.*
But as Christianity distanced itself from the paganism of Rome, it decided its own rustica script looked too heathen. Around the sixth century, rustica was largely retired, and the Church created what it deemed the Christian-looking uncial. By the start of the fifth century, most scribes across Europe had learned the new script, as some traveled to study the script and returned to teach it to their brothers.2
If capitalis still looks Roman to us now, uncial looks medieval, and indeed uncial-influenced fonts are used today for medieval-themed carnivals and fairs, albeit with punctuation that was not invented in the medieval era. Uncial had a long run and remained the most common script through the eighth century, mirroring the Church’s spread throughout Europe, and the script came to symbolize consolidation.
Uncial was the primary script but not the only one used at the time: In the fifth century, another script was invented to increase writing speed—a cursive of sorts called half-uncial. This was the first time minuscule (or lowercase) letters were introduced. Saint Augustine wrote in half-uncial, largely because it allowed him to write faster. Uncial and half-uncial were never mixed; you either wrote in ALLCAPTIALUNCIAL or allminusculehalfuncial.
In addition to half-uncial, other secondary scripts sprang up as the Church, and Romance languages, grew. Later termed “national hands” by paleographers even though they overlapped, these scripts signal regional differences: Merovingian was mainly used by the French, Visigothic by the Spanish, Lombardic by the Italians, etc. The most beautiful of these hands may well be Insular, developed in Ireland by Saint Patrick, who had learned half-uncial in Europe and brought it to Ireland in the latter half of the fifth century.
Irish monks embellished half-uncial, made it majuscule, and decorated the initial letters with impossibly intricate designs, creating a distinct hand. The gorgeous, jewel-like Book of Kells was written in Insular, and it may be the most beautiful example of all medieval writing.
Localized and expressive scripts added diversity to manuscripts, but they also made books harder to read for those not trained in a particular hand. Although all books were written in Latin, many people could not read scripts from different regions. Words were made incomprehensible to people who spoke the same language because the letters were written so differently.*
Documentary hands—or chancery hands—are yet another story in the history of medieval writing. These were developed for government and church business, and are a form of cursive that can be very quickly written. They tend to illegibility today, and few are the scholars who can transcribe their contents. There are only a handful of these manuscripts remaining, making a genealogy of cursive scripts hard to reconstruct.
This baroque explosion of geographically based scripts from the sixth to the ninth century was an aesthetic and diversifying boon, but to Church leaders it was seen as a form of insubordination, a refusal to adhere to central authority. To consolidate his power, to make the Church more centralized and less locally controlled, Charlemagne, the first emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, who ruled over most of Western Europe in the early ninth century—and is thought to have been illiterate—issued a decree that everyone use the same script he developed called Carolingian minuscule. Like its namesake, Carolingian minuscule conquered Europe and became the authoritative script in France, Germany, Northern Italy, and, eventually, England for two hundred years, from the ninth to the eleventh century.
Not surprisingly, Carolingian minuscule is uniform and standard. The shift to Carolingian minuscule shows, literally, a Church focused on legibility and practicality. Not coincidentally, it looks much like the earlier, Roman-influenced capitalis and capitalis rustica, as Charlemagne was consciously signaling a return to the classical roots of the Church. Centuries earlier, Roman-inspired scripts were connected to paganism, but Charlemagne was inspired by the early years of the Church. Thus, as uncial was developed to distinguish Christian from Roman texts, Carolingian was developed to reconnect the two.
Previous scripts, all with their discrete connotations, were preserved throughout the medieval era through an elaborate organization most often used on title pages of books called by contemporary scholars a “hierarchy of scripts.” For instance, a manuscript written in the Carolingian period might have the top line of a title page written in capitalis to show homage to the early Church; rustica for incipits, or the opening words; uncial for chapter headings, tables of contents, and the first line of each new chapter; and half-uncials for prefaces and second lines of text. The text itself would be written in Carolingian minuscule, the reigning script of the time.
Gothic script, or blackletter, which is commonly associated with medieval writing today, evolved as a variation of Carolingian minuscule during the twelfth century. Gothic compresses letters more tightly together. It is more illegible than most scripts, signaling the Church’s return to the diversity and localization of the pre-Carolingian period. Gothic is more of a family of scripts than a singular hand; dozens of variations were used across Europe until the invention of the printing press.
Italian scribes were never enamored with Gothic, which did not have the same reach as Carolingian minuscule (Petrarch found Gothic script to be “as though it had been designed … for something other than reading” 3), and in the fifteenth century a new script—clearer, and simpler, and more legible to many—was developed (or, according to some, invented by one man, Poggio Bracciolini).4 This script was humanist, a fairly faithful reinvention of Carolingian minuscule, itself a reinvention of capitalis. So severe was the rollback to Rome that distinguishing humanist from Carolingian minuscule, a then seven-hundred-year-old script, is difficult. It was not an easy switch to make: It required a concentrated effort to revive a script that had languished for centuries.
The humanists—Renaissance men seeking to revive classical learning, and realizing that for centuries some monks had been preserving classical texts in scriptoria by copying manuscripts in varying scripts—traveled across Europe looking for the best examples of Roman manuscripts. We know now that almost none survived, but some found what they thought were Roman manuscripts, only to discover later that they were actually ninth-century manuscripts done in Carolingian minuscule, the script created to emulate Roman script. That a book produced nine hundred years later could be confused with a Roman codex makes clear just how stable the production of writing had been during this period.
Humanist script took away the ligatures that connected the letters in Gothic, and used more space between letters than Gothic did. It also abandoned the in-the-know abbreviations used by Gothic scribes, and spelled out entire words. Humanist, as it were, let the air into handwriting; it was, in its references to humanism, accessibility, and classical culture, very much part of the Renaissance.
Stanley Morison, English type designer and historian of printing, argues the reason Gothic looked “barbarous” to humanists was rooted in Cosimo de’ Medici’s preference for humanist. Medici, to assert his power vis-à-vis the Vatican, wrote in a different hand. Morison uses “roman” to refer to humanist script:
The [Italics] invented and espoused by the Florentine humanists would never have been established but for the use and support given it by Cosimo de’ Medici, who bestowed upon it a quasi-authority. It was essentially different from that of the papal or Imperial chanceries. It is the only example of a script being established because of the accident that it corresponded with the taste of a merchant banker. Without him the then novel script would never have been more than the hobby of a society of ‘literati’. In this sense the humanistic roman may be described as a capitalist script.5
In his 1528 book on how to correctly pronounce Greek and Latin, De recta Graeci et Latini sermonis pronunciatione, the humanist Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (Erasmus of Rotterdam) wrote a dialogue between two schoolboys, Ursus and Leo, in which Gothic script is called “bad handwriting” with the “same drawbacks as incorrect pronunciation”:
Write out a speech of Cicero’s in Gothic script and you will say it is outlandish and barbarous. It either loses its elegance when so written, or the reader completely rejects it or is utterly worn out … On the other hand, you would hardly believe how much your material can be set off to advantage by elegant, clear and legible writing when the Latin words are represented in the Latin script.*
Elsewhere in the dialogue, Erasmus wrote his own history of handwriting. As the two talk, Erasmus defines what he considered the best way to write letters: exactly as they were written in Trajan’s Column, that always-rediscovered exemplar of exemplars:
URSUS: For common scribes with their curves, joins, tails and similar frivolous strokes, in which they revel out [of] a kind of pride, make writing more difficult, without any compensating advantage whatever. For surely you see how in bygone times the gothic hand was harder to learn than the Latin and how nowadays the French and German hands [are] more difficult than the Italian.
LEO: But the Greeks achieved a cursive style, at least in their minuscule.
URSUS: They succeeded in this as in everything else. But I wish that they had not attempted it. I would much prefer the script not to be disfigured with abbreviations.
LEO: But even the ancient Romans used marks of this kind … [T]here are people who affect a peculiar script of their own, writing Latin in such a way that it might well look like Greek to an unpracticed eye.
URSUS: Those people you describe should be scorned, not imitated …
LEO: But what sort of models for handwriting do you particularly commend?
URSUS: The most perfect example of majuscules is on coins struck at the time of Augustus and in the immediately succeeding centuries, especially in Italy; in the provinces the craftsmen owing to lack of experience fell short. For minuscules, Italy everywhere provides the models …
LEO: On what is the elegance of letters primarily based?
URSUS: On four things: their shape, the way they are joined, their linear arrangement, and their proportion … Nothing is uglier than … unevenness.
LEO: Yet this is just how my wife writes!
After making this slur, Leo continues to explain that Gothic is inappropriate for handwriting because it is ugly and barbaric, conflating the quality of one’s handwriting with the ability to express oneself, suggesting that one who writes in a barbarous hand is less literate.
Medieval scripts carry cultural meaning: Uncial was designed to distinguish Christianity from Rome, whereas humanist script self-consciously referred back to Christianity’s roots in that same Rome. To most of us, humanist is easier to read. And yet we still can see our own prejudices, our own values, in the nodding of heads when we get to this end of the story. We perceive these scripts as clean and legible because we have decided to define “clean” and “legible” along the same lines the humanists did when they invented the script, as did the Romans when they invented theirs. Humanist is easier for us to read because it is more familiar, not because it is intrinsically more legible. One could argue that the triumph of humanist is, ironically, the triumph of standardization. With the invention of the printing press, script could be literally standardized—identically reproduced through fonts.
* Note that the words “uppercase” and “lowercase” make no sense when discussing Roman and medieval script, because those terms come from printing technology: Typesetters put the capitals, or majuscule letters, in cases on top of the minuscules, then the term for “lowercase letters.”
* By comparison, distinguishing the handwriting in a letter written in 2014 from that written in 1714 is easy.
* One of the most common concerns many have about the dying of handwriting in the twenty-first century is the loss of history. “How can you read cursive if you cannot write it?” the question usually goes. The truth is, most of us already cannot read 99 percent of the historical record. Nor have people been able to read what has been written during their own lifetimes.
Much handwriting is so hard to read that some people spend years training to read certain scripts, learning a field of study called paleography. Paleographers, however, are not trained to learn all scripts. They specialize. For instance, Heather Wolfe, curator of manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library, is an expert in English secretary hand, the script used for writing documents and letters in England between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Wolfe would find it hard to read the scripts that Carin Ruff, a paleographer of the Cleveland Park Historical Society in Washington, D.C., specializes in, those of early medieval England. Some paleographers are experts in German scripts of the fourth and fifth century, or Latin scripts during the Roman era. Paleographers do not study writing on stone; that is another specialty, called epigraphy. Nor do paleographers study all the scripts of one time. Ruff is an expert on book hands (the scripts used to write manuscript books) of the medieval era, but she knows very little about documentary hands (the scripts used to write charters and other bureaucratic documents) of the same time. In other words, even someone whose life’s work is dedicated to reading cursive cannot read most cursive.
* Latin is the same as humanist script.