Humanist minuscule

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?", Bibliofilia 53 (1951:1–10).
^ Meiss, "Towards a more comprehensive Renaissance palaeography", The Art Bulletin 42 (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", Italica 39, 1962.

[1] D. Thomas, "What is the origin of the scrittura humanistica?", Bibliofilia 53 (1951:1–10).

[2] Meiss, "Towards a more comprehensive Renaissance palaeography", The Art Bulletin 42 (1960:1).

[3] 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.

[4] Martin Davies, "Humanism in script and print", in Jill Kraye, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, 1996:note 3 p. 60.

[5] Davies in Kraye (ed.) 1996:51.

[6] P.O. Kristeller, "The European Diffusion of Italian Humanism", Italica 39, 1962.

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]