Western Calligraphy: The Carolingian Form

Video Transcript

"So here we are, and I want to get back to the nitty gritty of our magical history tour. And I'd like you to take a look at this chart. Remember we started with this? And we've done the Roman, we've gone to the, remember we did the Rustics? And we've just zeroed in on the Uncials for a bit, and we also looked at the Insular Uncials. There was another hand, another kind of Half Uncial, kind of hand that happened around the fifth century. But what I want to do, is I want to just take a little bit of a skip. Hop, skip and a jump to what's called the Carolingian Minuscule. Now this is an interesting point in history, we're talking about the eighth to tenth centuries. When handwriting, Charlemagne decided that the handwriting was too desperate and nobody could read anything. So he decided that he wanted to actually get scribes together, and consciously create a hand that was more legible and more usable. So this is a very important point in history because generally speaking, the history of handwriting has to do with evolving. Evolution, so you can't pinpoint things, there's no way to pinpoint things the way you can pinpoint a typeface for example. Because the typeface just stays there. But even if you have a particular scribe doing a particular thing, he changes. My work changes. So the Carolingian was a return to something simpler or return to the classic. So that little charming little thing ends up being, looking about like this. And the ascenders were very tall."