Carolingian minuscule

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Carolingian minuscule alphabet
Example from 10th-century manuscript, Vulgate Luke 1:5–8.

Carolingian minuscule or Caroline minuscule is a script which developed as a calligraphic standard in Europe so that the Latin alphabet of Jerome's Vulgate Bible could be easily recognized by the literate class from one region to another. It was developed for the first time, circa AD 780, by a Benedictine monk of Corbie Abbey (about 150 kilometres (93 mi) north of Paris), Alcuin of York.[1] It was used in the Holy Roman Empire between approximately 800 and 1200. Codices, pagan and Christian texts, and educational material were written in Carolingian minuscule throughout the Carolingian Renaissance. The script developed into blackletter and became obsolete, though its revival in the Italian Renaissance forms the basis of more recent scripts.


Page of text (folio 160v) from a Carolingian Gospel Book (British Library, Add MS 11848), written in Carolingian minuscule. Text is Vulgate Luke 23:15–26.

The script is derived from Roman half uncial and the insular scripts that were being used in Irish and English monasteries. The strong influence of Irish literati on the script can be seen in the distinctively cló-Gaelach (Irish style) forms of the letters, especially a, e, d, g, s, and t.

Carolingian minuscule was created partly under the patronage of the Emperor Charlemagne (hence Carolingian). Charlemagne had a keen interest in learning, according to his biographer Einhard (here with apices):

Temptábat et scríbere, tabulásque et códicellós ad hoc in lectó sub cervícálibus circumferre solébat, ut, cum vacuum tempus esset, manum litterís effigiendís adsuésceret, sed parum successit labor praeposterus ac séró incohátus.


As a part of Charlemagne's educational and religious reforms, he decreed that every church and monastery should have a copy of Jerome's Vulgate Bible. Charlemagne wanted to make the Vulgate Bible more readable for preachers and easier to copy for scribes. Thus, Marcia Colish explains,

Charlemagne looked first to Anglo-Saxon England for a scholar to head his court school, finding him in Alcuin (c. 730–804). He assigned to Alcuin the correction of the Vulgate. In conjunction with this project, and later in his career when he became abbot of Tours, Alcuin invented a new style of handwriting, the Caroline minuscule. This script was far more legible than earlier medieval hands and an improvement on Roman book hands, since it provided spaces between the words, more extensive punctuation, and a hierarchy of hands, with capitals used for titles, a mix of capitals and lower-case letters for subtitles or chapter headings, and lower case for the body of the text. With the newly corrected Bible, pastors would be able to base their teaching and preaching on what it actually said.[1]

Although Charlemagne was never fully literate, he understood the value of literacy and a uniform script in running his empire. Charlemagne sent for the English scholar Alcuin of York to run his palace school and scriptorium at his capital, Aachen. Efforts to supplant Gallo-Roman and Germanic scripts had been under way before Alcuin arrived at Aachen, where he was master from 782 to 796, with a two-year break. The new minuscule was disseminated first from Aachen, of which the Ada Gospels provided classic models, and later from the influential scriptorium at Marmoutier Abbey (Tours), where Alcuin withdrew from court service as an abbot in 796 and restructured the scriptorium.[2]


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

Traditional charters, however, 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, like Gothic or Anglo-Saxon rather than Latin, tended to be expressed in traditional local script.

Carolingian script generally has fewer ligatures than other contemporary scripts, although the et (&), æ, rt, 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 . Ascenders are usually "clubbed" – they become thicker near the top.


A page of the Freising manuscripts, showing 10th-century Slovene text written in Carolingian minuscule. Bavarian State Library, Munich.


The new script spread through Western Europe most widely where Carolingian influence was strongest. In luxuriously produced lectionaries that now began to be produced for princely patronage of abbots and bishops, legibility was essential. It reached far afield: the 10th century Freising manuscripts, which contain the oldest Slovene language, the first Roman-script record of any Slavic language, are written in Carolingian minuscule. In Switzerland, Carolingian was used in the Rhaetian and Alemannic minuscule types. Manuscripts written in Rhaetian minuscule tend to have slender letters, resembling Insular script, with the letters ⟨a⟩ and ⟨t⟩, and ligatures such as ⟨ri⟩, showing similar to Visigothic and Beneventan. Alemannic minuscule, used for a short time in the early 9th century, is usually larger and broader, very vertical compared to the slanting Rhaetian type. In Austria, Salzburg was the major centre of Carolingian script, while Fulda, Mainz, and Würzburg were the major centres in Germany. German minuscule tends to be oval-shaped, very slender, and slants to the right. It has uncial features as well, such as the ascender of the letter ⟨d⟩ slanting to the left, and vertical initial strokes of ⟨m⟩ and ⟨n⟩.


Role in cultural transmission[edit]


Though the Carolingian minuscule was superseded by Gothic blackletter hands, it later seemed so thoroughly 'classic' to the humanists of the early Renaissance that they took these old Carolingian manuscripts to be ancient Roman originals and modelled their Renaissance hand, the humanist minuscule, on the Carolingian one.[3] From there the script passed to the 15th- and 16th-century printers of books, such as Aldus Manutius of Venice. In this way it forms the basis of our modern lowercase typefaces. Indeed, 'Carolingian minuscule' is a style of typeface, which approximates this historical hand, eliminating the nuances of size of capitals, long descenders, and so on.

See also[edit]


  1. ^ a b Colish, Marcia L. (1999). Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400–1400. The Yale Intellectual History of the West. Yale University Press. p. 67. ISBN 9780300078527.
  2. ^ The production of the scriptorium at Tours was reconstructed by Rand, Edward Kennard (1929). A Survey of the Manuscripts of Tours. Harvard University Press – via Mediaeval Academy of America.
  3. ^ Ullman, Berthold Louis (1960). The Origin and Development of Humanistic Script. Rome: Ed. di Storia e Letteratura. p. 12. GGKEY:SC91X3J9KAG.

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