(piano music)
- [Voiceover] We're looking at a medieval book.
This isn't printed, this is handwritten.
- [Voiceover] It's handwritten with a quill
with a reed.
- [Voiceover] Over time there were different
ways of writing.
- [Voiceover] The very peculiar thing and interesting
thing about medieval script is that you learn
to write in the style of the region
where you learned to write.
- [Voiceover] I think that's true today.
Sometimes I can tell if someone learned how
to write in England versus in the United States.
It looks different.
- [Voiceover] It looks so different to a medieval
scholar that you can actually, from a simple glance,
often, not always, tell if a scribe was trained
in Germany, France, England, Italy, Spain.
- [Voiceover] And can you also tell
when they were writing?
- [Voiceover] Well that's the magical thing.
That's something that you feel.
You open the book and it speaks to you.
In the Middle Ages between the year 800
when Charles the Great was ruling
and the later Middle Ages, around 1500,
there was two major book scripts.
There is Caroline Minuscule
and there is the Gothic Textualis,
which is the Gothic script.
In the Carolingian Age, which is the 9th,
10th centuries--
- [Voiceover] They standardized the script.
- [Voiceover] Yeah, so they wrote
in a Caroline Minuscule, which is the script
of the Carolingians.
- [Voiceover] And this book that we're looking
at now, what about this script?
- [Voiceover] This shouts at me I'm 11th century,
but it also tells me I'm very late
in the 11th century.
I can tell that by very tiny little details.
The study of medieval script is all
about the detail.
You see the m has three legs as m's do,
and they go left, left, left.
This tells me that's the Carolingian type of m,
whereas there is an n, which both legs
go to the right.
- [Voiceover] So when you opened this,
you immediately saw that Carolinian script.
- [Voiceover] The first thing you see is
this is Carolingian script.
You see that for example by the three legs
of the m, but if you look very carefully,
then you also see the first features
of the script that this is a successor
of Caroline Minuscule, which is Gothic script.
- [Voiceover] So we have a combination here.
- [Voiceover] Yeah, this is a hybrid script.
You can see that the scribe is already moving
towards the new Gothic style, but is still hanging
on to his old way of writing.
- [Voiceover] Where do you see Gothic features?
- [Voiceover] Okay, Gothic script, you see
for example, in a feature that we call angularity,
which means everything that is perfectly round
in the Carolingian Age gets sort of flattened.
You see it first in the h.
You see the top of the round part of the h
is flat, I sometimes call it ski slopes.
The p has it as well and the c and the o don't,
but they do later.
You can also see it by the pp combination.
For example, here I see the pp
and I can see that they're separated
so I know that they are from before
around 1150 because my own research shows
that, and other people's research as well,
that around 1150 there's a shift
from putting these two separate on the page
to combining them.
- [Voiceover] The Carolingian script is developed
by the Carolingians, by Charlemagne and his court
in what we would consider Germany,
and where is the Gothic developed?
- [Voiceover] That's the interesting thing.
The Caroline Minuscule was deliberately designed
and in a very short period of time,
whereas Gothic script sort of naturally evolved.
- [Voiceover] So Charlemagne imposed that script
on the documents, on the books that were produced
by his court and by the scriptorium
that he set up.
But the Gothic script evolves more organically.
- [Voiceover] The empire that Charles the Great
had to rule was so large that many people
wrote in different styles and people couldn't read
each other's books or each other's documents.
- [Voiceover] Makes it very hard
to rule an empire then.
- [Voiceover] Yes, so one script was needed,
hence came the Carolingian script.
But Gothic is a very slow developer.
It starts in the late 11th century,
and you can already see it here
in the late 11th century.
There are some Gothic features, angularity.
The feet might sometimes go to the right.
From the late 11th century it takes
almost until the middle of the 13th century
for that new script to develop.
In Gothic script there's a process called
lateral compression.
So there's a compression of the sentence
in that you pushed a sentence into a smaller space.
- [Voiceover] Why?
- [Voiceover] We don't know.
- [Voiceover] (laughs) Fair enough.
- [Voiceover] There is this movement,
you can measure it all over Europe,
but the result is let us get
to be placed closer together.
They ultimately, if you push hard enough
on both sides of the line,
they will start to overlap.
- [Voiceover] It gets harder and harder to read,
I would imagine.
- [Voiceover] Yes, and there's more abbreviations
that come in.
But ultimately, more text will fit on the page,
especially if you have a large Carolingian script.
It will perhaps contain about a fourth
of what you can fit on the same page
in a Gothic script.
- [Voiceover] Did that make the books
more cheap to produce?
- [Voiceover] Well if the book was made
commercially, you have to conclude that it's cheaper.
So is the drive that we want more text
on the page for aesthetical reasons,
or other reasons,
that sort of we have to flip less often?
Or is it for economical reasons?
- [Voiceover] And I imagine we don't
know the answer--
- [Voiceover] We don't know the answer to that one.
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