The upper and lower case letters we are used to today, along with spaces between words, punctuation, and enlarged initial letters, were a development of the late 8th century known as the Carolingian Minuscule. This manuscript hand not only established a uniform book hand that would be used throughout Charlemagne’s sprawling empire, but it also established the kinds of letter forms that would serve as the models for every Western typographic design to our current day. Today, we essentially read and write in the Carolingian Minuscule.
The Carolingian Minuscule itself developed from the insular uncial scripts and partly from the Roman half uncial that were used at Irish and Anglo-Celtic monasteries that had been founded all over Europe by the late 6th century. The insular monks who founded these monasteries also brought the traditions of word spacing, punctuation, and initial letters with them to the continent. The uncial scripts themselves derived from the late imperial Rustic Capitals, which themselves seem to have been based on Roman epigraphic letter forms.
The main characteristic of the miniscule is the breaking of the x-height with large capital letters and the characteristic ascenders and descenders found in such letters as b, d, f, g, h, k, l, p, q, t, and the rounding of capital letters into forms we know as “lower case” today, such as a, e, i, m, n. The precursors to these can be seen clearly in the first set of examples of the Irish half uncial from our facsimile copy of the Book of Kells (Luzern: Faksimile Verlag, 1990) and the Anglo-Celtic uncial form found in our facsimile copy of the Lindisfarne Gospels (second to last image; Olten and Lausanne, Switzerland: Urs Graf, 1956-60). The original manuscripts were produced at the monasteries of Iona in about 800 CE, and Lindisfarne around 725 CE, respectively. The difference between these and the Carolingian Minuscule is that the letter forms in these manuscripts are all majuscules, i.e., formal capital letters, not the informal miniscule hand that we associate with “lower-case” letters today.
The last example is that of the Roman half uncial, a majuscule hand, also used by Anglo-Celtic scribes on the continent. This example is from our facsimile copy of the Lorsch Gospels ( New York: George Braziller, 1967), a Carolingian manuscript originally produced at Aachen around 810 CE. Here, no spacing between words or punctuation can be seen.
It is said that Charlemagne tasked his main Anglo-Celtic scholar Alcuin of York with devising a new, uniform, manuscript book hand. Alcuin, but more likely others, turned to the informal versions of the uncial letter forms they were familiar with and the Carolingian Minuscule was born! With, of course, profound implications for how we read and write today.
View our post on the early use of the Carolingian Minuscule.
Morning #miniscules & #majuscule . Some strokes are really difficult when you’re left handed. Sometimes feel like I might have picked the wrong hobby. #lefthandedcalligraphy #calligraphy #pilotparallelpen (at Stevens Point, Wisconsin) https://www.instagram.com/p/CSMiDmVrBNu/?utm_medium=tumblr
Today we started the #majuscules of #showmeyourletters I would like to show you a before and after of my #miniscules There are still room for improvements but that's a big leap for me. Yay!!! Time to reward myself by getting more pens. . . . . . #showmeyoudrill #beforeandafter #brushlettering #tombowfudenosuke #letteringnewbie #jasmineeeshew https://www.instagram.com/p/Bq6KlX0h4HN/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=178n621khs5lq
Inuyasha + Pokemon with kanna, Rin, jaken, kaede?:) possibly?
ahh you’re probably asking for an edit like the ones I made before but unfortunately, I can’t make some for Kanna, Rin, Jaken and Kaede because I don’t have any sprites for them! Unless I make some with only their picture?? Or I could just try to come up with some teams ?
