Carolingian Minuscule - Characteristics

Characteristics

Carolingian minuscule was uniform, with rounded shapes in clearly distinguishable glyphs, disciplined and above all, legible. Clear capital letters and spaces between words—norms we take for granted—became standard in Carolingian minuscule, which was one result of a campaign to achieve a culturally unifying standardization across the Carolingian Empire.

The value of a standardized hand is vivid to anyone who reads. Legibility may appear to be of secondary value, even a drawback, in some cultural contexts. Traditional charters, for example, continued to be written in a Merovingian "chancery hand" long after manuscripts of Scripture and classical literature were being produced in the minuscule hand. Documents written in a local language, in Gothic, or Anglo-Saxon rather than Latin, tended to be expressed in traditional local handwritings.

Carolingian script generally has fewer ligatures than other contemporary scripts, although the et (&), ae (æ), rt, st (st), and ct ligatures are common. The letter d often appears in an uncial form, with an ascender slanting to the left, but the letter g is essentially the same as the modern minuscule letter, rather than the previously common uncial g. Ascenders are usually 'clubbed'—i.e., they become thicker near the top.

The early period of the script, during Charlemagne's reign in the late 8th century and early 9th, still has widely varying letter forms in different regions. The uncial form of the letter a, similar to a double c (cc), is still used in manuscripts from this period. There is also use of punctuation such as the question mark, as in Beneventan script of the same period. The script flourished during the 9th century, when regional hands developed into an international standard, with less variation of letter forms. Modern glyphs, such as s and v, began to appear (as opposed to the "long s" and u), and ascenders, after thickening at the top, were finished with a three-cornered wedge. The script began to decline slowly after the 9th century. In the 10th and 11th centuries, ligatures were rare, and ascenders began to slant to the right and were finished with a fork. The letter w also began to appear. By the 12th century, Carolingian letters became more angular and were written closer together, less legibly than in previous centuries; at the same time, the modern dotted i appeared.