Perhaps no other relic of the European Middle Ages captures our imagination more than illuminated medieval manuscripts, or those documents decorated with images and colored pigments. Serving as windows unto a lost world of kings, ladies, faith, war, and culture, they communicate complex visual and textual narratives of Europe’s collective cultural heritage and patrimony. In this fashion, illuminated manuscripts are dynamic messages from our communal past that are still relevant today in fields like graphic design and typography. In this seven-week course, students will explore the material creation, content, and historical context of illuminated medieval European manuscripts. Students will acquire an introductory knowledge of their distinguishing characteristics, their cataloguing and periodization (when they were created), the methods utilized to produce them, and their historical context and value. Student achievement will be assessed using not only traditional multiple-choice quizzes, but more importantly will be evaluated based on individual student projects. In their final projects students will either (1) produce a board of commented images about medieval manuscripts or (2) prepare a physical manuscript using medieval methods. The best of these peer-evaluated projects will be posted on the Deciphering Secrets website, which is our collective citizen scholarship web presence that encourages and supports our global citizen scholars appreciation and contributions to transcription of medieval manuscripts. Finally, we wish to highlight that this course is an exciting international collaboration between the University of Colorado (USA) and Universidad Complutense Madrid (Spain).
5.3. The Cycles of Latin Writing (Part 1)
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From the course by University of Colorado System
Deciphering Secrets: The Illuminated Manuscripts of Medieval Europe
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University of Colorado System
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From the lesson
PALEOGRAPHY AND A HISTORICAL CASE STUDY AND WRITING THE CODEX
WEEK #5
Meet the Instructors
Dr. Roger Louis Martínez-DávilaAssociate Professor
History
Ana B. Sanchez-PrietoDr. in Medieval History, Dr. in Education Sciences
Historiographical Sciences and Techniques
Writing a script that is any writing you see in Latin characters which
includes the practical totality of the Western European languages whether Romanic or not,
has several of considerably through time from the sixth century BC to the 16th century
AD My purpose here is to give a general impression of that evolution.
The evolution of writing is the primary objective of palaeography.
And, in my regular class on palaeography,
we deal with it more in depth during our complete academic year.
That means that in the short half hour of this video,
I cannot even start to scratch the surface.
I should limit myself to generalizations that imply if not errors,
at least in accuracies.
And, as practically, everything else in the Western European civilization,
our history starts in Rome.
Towards the seventh century BC,
the Romans learned the art of writing and
developed a primitive Latin alphabet that we know as,
Archaic, deriving it from the Etruscan alphabet,
which in its time,
was derived from the Greek one.
Towards the third century BC,
These archaic Latin alphabet had evolve towards
the regular and elegant forms that we know as Capital,
that is the base of every writing system in Western Europe since.
As a matter of fact,
or were upper case letters keep their morphology of the classic capital.
Other doctors has change to some some extent.
But the magnificent letters that we see in Roman inscriptions and in
the most luxurious books have a sort of
domestic version much lighter and more of a much quicker execution.
Cursive that we say in paleographical terminology,
which departs in some instances,
quite considerably from the essential morphology and therefore,
they can be really hard to read.
This cursive script is known as, Cursive Capital,
simply because it is capital that is minuscule and it is cursive.
As a matter of fact, and practically,
all this successes period,
we shall encounter this same duality.
The script adopts two basic concrete realizations.
The first type takes the form of a bookhand that is letters drawn slowly and carefully,
closely following the idea models and easy to read.
The cursive type with quick movements and dis-articulated morphology is not so readable.
This cursive writing is the perfect environment for graphical experimentation,
and as a matter of fact,
it is here were most doctors changes occur.
And these changes when accepted and assumed in the bookhand,
give rise to more or less permanent changes in the morphology,
and the most drastic morphology mutation for
the Latin writing occurred during the third century AD.
You may have noticed that so far,
we have seen no lower case letters.
This is because lowercase letters didn't exist yet.
Lower case letters are the result of a process of
graphical change through which by virtue of a very complex evolution,
not lacking contradictions and backward stems,
the Latin writing acquired its final and definitive shape.
With the double system of lower case and upper case letters,
articulated in our reach and variegated,
dialectic of graphical signs,
that from this moment on would animate all the forms of writing a script until this day.
The morphology of this primitive minuscule is
so different from the morphology of the capital,
that it is hard to see at first sight how it could happen,
that one system derives from the other,
but with a good deal of difficulty,
the process can be followed in the not so abundant Roman papyri written in cursive that
have been preserved and this is our oldest witness in a bookhand proper.
It is known as, Epitome Livii,
and now it is in the British Library.
From this script starts typification process and
graphical canonization that takes shape in two different realizations.
The first one known as,
Uncial, completed its canonization process.
In the second, the half-uncial,
that process was interrupted by the collapse of the Roman empire.
Uncial script has been preserved in more than 500 manuscript from the
fourth to the eighth centuries and in a good measure was the vehicle for
almost the whole classical literary culture from antiquity to
the middle ages and although not alone of the Latin Christian culture as well.
As you can appreciate in the image,
uncial it is still a hybrid script.
The letters that form the uncial alphabet have no uniformity of origin.
They do not adopt precise forms and they were
incorporated in different moments for the construction of this alphabet.
It contains minuscule forms that, by the way,
are the majority together with minuscule forms.
H-L-Q and for characteristically uncial forms,
A-D-E-M were dramatically are not many but confer its personality to the whole system.
During the middle ages,
from the eighth or ninth centuries,
uncial is still used but yet some artificial script
and for special occasions such as the text of a very luxurious manuscript,
titles, incipits, and similar things.
Half-uncial is the first typification of for a purely minuscule script,
but it is not yet constrained to a strictly recurring forms with enough
regularity to be assumed as distinctive or for a script type
to the point that we define as half-uncial and a manuscript written in
a non-capital script in which at least for nun-uncial form occur that is minuscule forms.
And these can be, b, d,
m and r or a, b,
g, and s or other similar combinations.
Half-uncial is one of those cases where copies couldn't or didn't
want to submit themselves to more calligraphic types or perhaps,
it response to our desire of far bigger freedom in the execution of their work,
depending on the content, the purpose,
and the public of the text they were coping.
In any case, the simple design of the half-uncial,
its economy, and its legibility,
made it very appropriate for
almost any purpose and they it spread very quickly across Europe.
In Ireland, it was also practiced in the fifth century and they are reshaped,
gave rise to un-expanded alphabet.
In Italy, Spain, and France,
the half-uncial appears sporadically in summer scriptoria.
But, during the eighth and ninth centuries,
it couldn't resist the progress of the new minuscule and it finally disappeared.
However, during those times,
there was a struggle with an internal disintegration
that threatened even its mere existence as our civilization.
And with it, the surviving of the graphic union,
because between the seventh and eighth century,
the graphical system that had been common to
every Latin speaker disintegrated in a plate of forms in a way very
similar to the linguistic evolution from classical to
vulgar Latin unto the early Roman vernaculars.
We are, in a moment,
that there's not yet proper middle ages but a transition time that we know as,
in happy expression of Giorgio Cencetti, Graphic Particularism.
Here, the formation of new local script happens
spontaneously due to the general tendency that takes
place in certain graphical processes when
the existing scripts cannot satisfy the specific needs of the moment.
And then, almost inadvertently,
the old shapes evolve into new ones,
and new types are consciously or unconsciously adopted.
In this case, it was the need of a new cursive,
more agile than the uncial and the
half-uncial but less free and careless than the Roman cursive.
And all this happened independently in each place.
The new types differ from each other in
a considerable amount and not only in the graphical realization,
but also in the extension of their existence in time as well as in space.
This particularism is a product of territorial fragmentation,
process several questions that are different depending on
the geographical areas and suffers from a terminological deficiency.
Since polygraphical scholarship has traditionally used two different terms to label it,
precarolingian scripts and national hands.
And none of those response to the common aspects of the whole set.
Some of those script managed to extend through
geographical areas more or less corresponding to the new Germanic kingdoms,
and were utilized during a considerable span of time.
That is the case of the so-called, Insular Script,
in the British Isles,
the Visigothic in the Iberian Peninsula,
the Beneventan script in the south of Italy,
and I'll go just to a certain extent,
and in a somewhat different way,
the Merovingian script in the Chancery of the Frankish kings.
But there was no dominant canon in existence
where the activity of the scriptorial centers is limited to
hands that at most are typified and that extent
only within a radius of 30 or 40 kilometers from its focus,
and last only for a few days and between
the end of the eighth century and the central years of the ninth.
One can discover the first manifestations of a new Rito into
the graphical unity to the affirmation of that precarolingian script,
not totally uniform yet but that is
the embryo from which the new minuscu le would develop.
And this new minuscule is the Carolingian minuscule.
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