Caroline Minuscule |
Script Type : minuscule Date : 8th to 12th centuries; this example is 11th century Location : France, Germany, England, Spain, northern Italy, Scandinavia; this example is from England Function : Book hand and basis for document hands |
This sample of text comes from the early 11th century Harley Psalter (British Library, Harley 603), by permission of the British Library. |
It is a copy of the Utrecht Psalter, a Carolingian work of the early 9th century. This copy was produced in Christ Church, Canterbury. The script is a small neat Caroline minuscule. |
Pass cursor over letters to see enlarged examples taken from the page illustrated above. |
Distinctive letters : Once you manage the tall s and the short t, the rest of this is easy as all the letters are of familiar form. There are no examples of j, k, w. y or z in this example. While Caroline minuscule largely dispensed with the multitude of confusing ligatures that made the reading of pre-Carolingian scripts so difficult, it introduced two of its own, ct and st . These were to prove an enduring idiosyncrasy of the script. The script is neat, the letters well separated, the words clearly separated and there are no abbreviations. It's hardly paleography at all! Run the cursor slowly over the lines of text for a quick fix on it. For a more detailed examination, work through the paleography exercises. |
Script Index |
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