An introduction to Medieval scripts

(piano music) - [Voiceover] We're looking at a medieval book. This isn't printed, this is handwritten. - [Voiceover] It's handwritten with a quill with a reed. - [Voiceover] Over time there were different ways of writing. - [Voiceover] The very peculiar thing and interesting thing about medieval script is that you learn to write in the style of the region where you learned to write. - [Voiceover] I think that's true today. Sometimes I can tell if someone learned how to write in England versus in the United States. It looks different. - [Voiceover] It looks so different to a medieval scholar that you can actually, from a simple glance, often, not always, tell if a scribe was trained in Germany, France, England, Italy, Spain. - [Voiceover] And can you also tell when they were writing? - [Voiceover] Well that's the magical thing. That's something that you feel. You open the book and it speaks to you. In the Middle Ages between the year 800 when Charles the Great was ruling and the later Middle Ages, around 1500, there was two major book scripts. There is Caroline Minuscule and there is the Gothic Textualis, which is the Gothic script. In the Carolingian Age, which is the 9th, 10th centuries-- - [Voiceover] They standardized the script. - [Voiceover] Yeah, so they wrote in a Caroline Minuscule, which is the script of the Carolingians. - [Voiceover] And this book that we're looking at now, what about this script? - [Voiceover] This shouts at me I'm 11th century, but it also tells me I'm very late in the 11th century. I can tell that by very tiny little details. The study of medieval script is all about the detail. You see the m has three legs as m's do, and they go left, left, left. This tells me that's the Carolingian type of m, whereas there is an n, which both legs go to the right. - [Voiceover] So when you opened this, you immediately saw that Carolinian script. - [Voiceover] The first thing you see is this is Carolingian script. You see that for example by the three legs of the m, but if you look very carefully, then you also see the first features of the script that this is a successor of Caroline Minuscule, which is Gothic script. - [Voiceover] So we have a combination here. - [Voiceover] Yeah, this is a hybrid script. You can see that the scribe is already moving towards the new Gothic style, but is still hanging on to his old way of writing. - [Voiceover] Where do you see Gothic features? - [Voiceover] Okay, Gothic script, you see for example, in a feature that we call angularity, which means everything that is perfectly round in the Carolingian Age gets sort of flattened. You see it first in the h. You see the top of the round part of the h is flat, I sometimes call it ski slopes. The p has it as well and the c and the o don't, but they do later. You can also see it by the pp combination. For example, here I see the pp and I can see that they're separated so I know that they are from before around 1150 because my own research shows that, and other people's research as well, that around 1150 there's a shift from putting these two separate on the page to combining them. - [Voiceover] The Carolingian script is developed by the Carolingians, by Charlemagne and his court in what we would consider Germany, and where is the Gothic developed? - [Voiceover] That's the interesting thing. The Caroline Minuscule was deliberately designed and in a very short period of time, whereas Gothic script sort of naturally evolved. - [Voiceover] So Charlemagne imposed that script on the documents, on the books that were produced by his court and by the scriptorium that he set up. But the Gothic script evolves more organically. - [Voiceover] The empire that Charles the Great had to rule was so large that many people wrote in different styles and people couldn't read each other's books or each other's documents. - [Voiceover] Makes it very hard to rule an empire then. - [Voiceover] Yes, so one script was needed, hence came the Carolingian script. But Gothic is a very slow developer. It starts in the late 11th century, and you can already see it here in the late 11th century. There are some Gothic features, angularity. The feet might sometimes go to the right. From the late 11th century it takes almost until the middle of the 13th century for that new script to develop. In Gothic script there's a process called lateral compression. So there's a compression of the sentence in that you pushed a sentence into a smaller space. - [Voiceover] Why? - [Voiceover] We don't know. - [Voiceover] (laughs) Fair enough. - [Voiceover] There is this movement, you can measure it all over Europe, but the result is let us get to be placed closer together. They ultimately, if you push hard enough on both sides of the line, they will start to overlap. - [Voiceover] It gets harder and harder to read, I would imagine. - [Voiceover] Yes, and there's more abbreviations that come in. But ultimately, more text will fit on the page, especially if you have a large Carolingian script. It will perhaps contain about a fourth of what you can fit on the same page in a Gothic script. - [Voiceover] Did that make the books more cheap to produce? - [Voiceover] Well if the book was made commercially, you have to conclude that it's cheaper. So is the drive that we want more text on the page for aesthetical reasons, or other reasons, that sort of we have to flip less often? Or is it for economical reasons? - [Voiceover] And I imagine we don't know the answer-- - [Voiceover] We don't know the answer to that one. (piano music)