Page from the Book of Hours of Giovanni II Bentivoglio, Bologna, c. 1497–1500. Humanist minuscule with colored versals and decorations.The evolution of minuscule Latin script
Humanist minuscule is a handwriting or style of script that was invented in secular circles in Italy, at the beginning of the fifteenth century.[1] "Few periods in Western history have produced writing of such great beauty", observes the art historian Millard Meiss.[2] The new hand was based on Carolingian minuscule, which Renaissance humanists, obsessed with the revival of antiquity and their role as its inheritors, took to be ancient Roman:
[W]hen they handled manuscript books copied by eleventh- and twelfth-century scribes, Quattrocento literati thought they were looking at texts that came right out of the bookshops of ancient Rome".[3]
The humanistic term litterae antiquae (the "ancient letters") applied to this hand was an inheritance from the fourteenth century, where the phrase had been opposed to litterae modernae ("modern letters"), or Blackletter.[4]
The humanist minuscule was connected to the humanistic content of the texts for which it was the appropriate vehicle. By contrast, fifteenth-century texts of professional interest in the fields of law, medicine, and traditional Thomistic philosophy still being taught in the universities were circulated in blackletter, whereas vernacular literature had its own, separate, distinctive traditions. "A humanist manuscript was intended to suggest its contents by its look," Martin Davies has noted: "old wine in new bottles, or the very latest vintage in stylish new dress".[5] With the diffusion of humanist manuscripts produced in the highly organized commercial scriptoria of Quattrocento Italy, the Italian humanist script reached the rest of Europe, a very important aspect which has not yet been fully explored.[6]
^D. Thomas, "What is the origin of the scrittura humanistica?", Bibliofilia53 (1951:1–10).
^Meiss, "Towards a more comprehensive Renaissance palaeography", The Art Bulletin42 (1960:1).
^Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press) 2006:134. Knowledge of ancient scripts sometimes went backwards before it went forwards; the late medieval Reims Gospel, an Old Church Slavonic manuscript using Glagolithic and Cyrillic scripts, was thought to have been scribed by Saint Jerome himself, and in the late sixteenth century incorporated into the coronation ceremony of French kings, who took the oath of the Order of the Holy Spirit by touching the book.
^Martin Davies, "Humanism in script and print", in Jill Kraye, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, 1996:note 3 p. 60.
^Davies in Kraye (ed.) 1996:51.
^P.O. Kristeller, "The European Diffusion of Italian Humanism", Italica39, 1962.
and 26 Related for: Humanist minuscule information
Humanistminuscule is a handwriting or style of script that was invented in secular circles in Italy, at the beginning of the fifteenth century. "Few periods...
Italian Renaissance, when the humanistminuscule script was also developed from it. By this latter line the Carolingian minuscule is a direct ancestor of most...
(or more formally majuscule) and smaller lowercase (or more formally minuscule) in the written representation of certain languages. The writing systems...
hand Secretary hand Court hand Library hand Blackletter Humanistminuscule Carolingian minuscule Roman cursive Uncial script Insular script Beneventan script...
capital and minuscule letters. It was the Carolingian minuscule that Renaissance humanists took to be Roman and employed as humanistminuscule, from which...
hand", also developed in the Vatican but based on humanistminuscule (itself based on Carolingian minuscule), was introduced in the 1420s by Niccolò Niccoli;...
even affected handwriting; Humanists usually wrote Latin in a humanistminuscule script derived from Carolingian minuscule, the ultimate ancestor of most...
the "Italian" style instead, a cursive script developed from the humanistminuscule or "Roman" hand which was easier to read but also easier to forge...
Carolingian minuscule was created by the Italian humanists in the fifteenth century, called by them littera antiqua and now called humanistminuscule. This...
Roman buildings and monuments. However, humanist scholars of the early 15th century mistook Carolingian minuscule as the authentic writing style of the...
introduced on this basis by Coluccio Salutati and was used frequently in humanistminuscule and occasionally in Gothic script during the Renaissance. Beneš, Carrie...
Ullman identified him as the inventor of the type writing known as Humanistminuscule, which gave rise at the end of the fourteenth century to Roman type...
rediscovery of old Carolingian texts encouraged the creation of the humanistminuscule or littera antiqua. The 17th century saw the Batarde script from France...
classicizing script—the Carolingian minuscule that Renaissance humanists took to be Roman and employed as humanistminuscule, from which has developed early...
revived by Italian humanist scholars in the early 15th century, it is found only in documents of deliberately classicising humanistminuscule produced by Italian...
Trismegistus. While Cusanus writes in a Gothic script, Bussi uses a cursive Humanistminuscule. While Cusanus wrote lengthy marginal notes, Bussi preferred to keep...
[ˈjaːkopo sannadˈdzaːro]; 28 July 1458 – 6 August 1530) was an Italian poet, humanist, member and head of the Accademia Pontaniana from Naples. He wrote easily...
classicizing script, the Carolingian minuscule that Renaissance humanists took to be Roman and employed as humanistminuscule, from which has developed early...
Europe. The Italian humanists were struck by the eminent legibility of the manuscripts, written in the improved Carolingian minuscule of the 10th and 11th...
labeled Gothic. This in contrast to Carolingian minuscule, a highly legible script which the humanists called littera antiqua ("the ancient letter"), wrongly...
phonology Medieval Greek Modern Greek phonology Vowel shift Minuscule 541 and Minuscule 543 – manuscripts with an unusual number of itacistic errors...
hundred years since the widespread use of this style, the humanist scribes mistook Carolingian minuscule as the authentic writing style of the ancients (as opposed...
and self-styled as Giovan Giωrgio Trissino, was a Venetian Renaissance humanist, poet, dramatist, diplomat, grammarian, linguist, and philosopher. He first...
11th century Carolingian minuscule copy of the Annales Fuldenses kept in the Humanist Library of Sélestat. Entry for the year 855: Earthquake at Mainz...
indicating an origin in the Baroccianum, a Venetian collection assembled by the humanist Francesco Barozzi (Barocius). A large part of that collection was sold...
Global Information
