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PALEOGRAPHY AND MANUSCRIPTS
. Before the invention of the printing press and movable type in the 15th century, books
were hand-produced by scribes trained to copy literary texts, documents, or both. The
scribes in many cases would also add minor decoration consisting of running titles,
penwork initials, and headings in red and other colors. In the most elaborate volumes,
scribes were assisted by illuminators who executed intricate initials, borders, and
miniatures and frequently used gold leaf for dramatic visual effect.
The format, script, decoration, and binding of manuscript books depended upon their
date and place of origin as well as upon their function within society. Volumes intended
for use by a community of monks in 9th-century Tours would differ significantly from
those written for a university student in 13th-century Paris.
The disintegration of the Roman Empire in the West saw the rise of “national hands”
across Europe. These hands, tied to geographical locations, gradually superseded the
widely used Roman system of scripts. In Merovingian Gaul, the local scripts were
derived ultimately from the later Roman cursive, or running hand, used for official
documents, but with an admixture of letterforms from the more formal bookscripts also
used in the Roman Empire.
Among the monastic or cathedral scriptoria (writing places) that produced a distinctive
French national hand is the abbey of Luxeuil in Burgundy. Founded ca. 590 by the
Irishman St. Columbanus, Luxeuil was one of the most influential centers of Merovingian
culture in the 7th and 8th centuries; its scriptorium produced fine manuscript books in a
spidery style of writing today termed “Luxeuil minuscule.” The first illustration
reproduces a leaf of a manuscript of St. Augustine’s Sermons copied at Luxeuil in the
second half of the 7th century (Beinecke 481, no. 2). The minuscule script retains many
features of its cursive models: letters were often run together; the words and sentences
were usually not distinguished by spaces or by punctuation. Luxeuil minuscule differed
from Roman cursive, however, in that the sprawling loops of the earlier running script
were replaced by neatly clubbed shafts on such letters as b, d, and I; the Roman cursive
was subdued into a style of writing suitable for copying Latin manu script books. Other
distinctive types of French national hands developed at the monasteries of Corbie and
Laon and the convent at Chelles.
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1300