Carolingian Minuscule: A Little History

In 800 Charlemagne became Emperor of the West.  One of his concerns was the educational and religious advancement of his subjects.  With the help of one of his teachers, an Anglo-Saxon Benedictine monk named Alcuin, they went about developing and establishing a script that would be simple to write and read.  Now to be clear neither Charlemagne nor Alcuin “invented” this particular script because there were many variations of this script already being used at the time.  One of the more popular ones was a script developed at the Corbie Monastery later called Littera Gallica.  It was a variation of the Littera Gallica that Charlemagne’s court scriptorium adopted as the official script.  Being easy to read and write as well as being attractive it grew in popularity and reached far beyond the Empire’s borders.  It was used from the eighth century to the mid-twelfth century which lead into the Gothic period.

This information and more information on the history of some of the scripts that I will be covering come from a book called MEDIEVAL CALLIGRAPHY: Its History and Technique by Marc Drogin.

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