ALCUIN AND THE CAROLINGIAN RENAISSANCE
A TEACHING RESOURCE
ALCUIN’S INFLUENCE ON
MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPTS
ACTIVITY
SHEET
7
iftherewerenospacesbetweenwrittenwordswouldntitbefifficulttoreadthem?
You probably found it quite hard to read the sentence
above, and you will probably agree that it is much
easier to read words when there are spaces between
them. Even though putting spaces between the written
words of a language may seem, today, to be an
obvious thing to do, spaces did not appear between
the words of manuscripts written in the Early Middle
Ages. Instead, the page would be filled with joined-up
words, which could be very difficult to read.
Alcuin’s ideas for easy-to-read
documents
• Use headings and titles
• Use letters of different sizes for
different parts of the document (a
bigger size for headings and a
smaller size for the main text)
As well as putting gaps between the words, how
would you make a written document easy to
understand? Think about modern magazines and
newspapers. How are their articles presented?
Your thoughts were probably similar to the ideas that
Alcuin had over 1200 years ago. Read the grey box
on the right to find out.
• Put the text into columns
• Include illustrations
• Using a script (handwriting) that
is clear
Charlemagne’s Scriptorium
When Alcuin was in charge of the scriptorium (writing
room) of Charlemagne’s palace at Aachen he was
responsible for making sure that letters, laws and
books could be read by educated people all over
Charlemagne’s empire. This was one of the ways in
which Charlemagne maintained control of his vast
kingdom. Alcuin’s ways of making the written words
clear and easier to understand were very similar to
the techniques used by newspapers and magazines
today. The main difference is that, because printing
presses (or computers) had not been invented, every
document had to be written by hand. Under Alcuin’s
influence, the way words appeared on the page of a
manuscript dramatically changed.
Carolingian minuscule
Extract from Alcuin’s letter, now in the British
Library, reproduced with permission
AbcdefghI
jklmnopqr
stuvwxyz
One of Alcuin’s most important developments was a new type of
handwriting (or script). This script was very clear, and much
easier to read than the ‘Merovingian script’ that it replaced. It
was also relatively quick to write, which meant that documents
could be copied more efficiently. Alcuin’s script was called
‘Carolingian minuscule’. The word Carolingian comes from the
Latin for Charles (Carolus); it means that the script came from the
Carolingian period (the historical time when Charlemagne and his
sons ruled the Frankish empire. ‘Miniscule’ means that the script
was made up of lower case letters. Scripts consisting of upper
case, or capital letters were called ‘majuscule’ scripts.
On the left is a picture of a tenth-century copy of aletter by
Alcuin. Have a look at the letters. They are very similar to letters
of today. The only letter that is a little different is the ‘s’.
Underneath the picture is a bigger version of the alphabet in a
font that is similar to Carolingian miniscule.
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ALCUIN AND THE CAROLINGIAN RENAISSANCE
A TEACHING RESOURCE
ALCUIN’S INFLUENCE ON
MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPTS
ACTIVITY
SHEET
7
Why is such old writing so easy to read?
The reason that we find Carolingian miniscule quite
easy to read today is because, when the printing press
was first invented during the fifteenth-century, some
printers chose to base the letters for their typescript on
Carolingian miniscule and variations of this type have
been used by printers ever since. Even though it was
developed over one thousand years ago, we can
understand Alcuin’s style of writing because we have
become quite familiar with letters shaped in a similar
way.
Headings and titles
Carolingian minuscule was used for the main body of Alcuin’s
books and letters. Some books were lavishly decorated to make
them more interesting. A script called ‘uncial’ was used for
headings. This script is a ‘majuscule’, using only capital letters.
The box on the right shows the alphabet in a computer font
similar to uncial script
Often, the first letter on a page would be illuminated, or
decorated. On the right is an example of an illuminated letter.
a
h
o
v
b c d e f g
I j k l m n
p q r s t u
w x y z
The more decoration a book contained, the more expensive it
would have been to produce. Wealthy people often paid monks
to copy books (such as gospels, or even the whole Bible) and to
include lavish illumination. This would demonstrate how wealthy
they were. Sometimes highly decorated books were given as gifts
to kings, to show how greatly they were respected by their more
wealthy subjects. .
Paper and writing materials
In Alcuin’s time, scribes and illuminators did not write
on paper. Instead, they used parchment or vellum.
Both these substances are made from the skin of an
animal. Parchment comes from sheepskin and vellum
from calfskin. First, the skin was soaked in lime
solution for many days, then it was squeezed out and
stretched on a frame to dry. This makes the skin more
pliable. Once it is dry, the parchment or vellum maker
used a knife shaped like a half moon to scrape the
surface so that it is ready to be written on. This was a
highly skilled job, as it was very easy to make holes
in the parchment or vellum and ruin it.
Scribes made their pens from feathers (usually goose
feathers). There are many surviving medieval recipes
for ink. Some of these recipes require ingredients
which came from parts of the world far away from
Charlemagne’s empire. This shows that the monks
must have traded with people in distant countries,
and also demonstrates how much money
Charlemagne was prepared to spend on books and
documents.
Make your own manuscript page
If you have written a poem of kennings (activity 8),
why not present it in the style of a medieval
manuscript? You probably won’t have a real piece of
vellum or parchment, but you could try to find some
cream paper. You could start your poem with an
illuminated capital letter, perhaps illustrating the
theme of your poem. Once you have finished your
first letter, you could use writing based on
Carolingian miniscule for the main body of your
poem.
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