中世纪字体的演变 | 加洛林体与哥特体

Smarthistory

An introduction to Medieval scripts

中文翻译：张明瑄

翻译仅供参考 | 视频不得商用

视频英文稿：

We're looking at a medieval book.

This isn't printed, this is handwritten.

It's handwritten with a quill

with a reed.

Over time there were different

ways of writing.

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.

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.

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.

And can you also tell

when they were writing?

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--

They standardized the script.

Yeah, so they wrote

in a Caroline Minuscule, which is the script

of the Carolingians.

And this book that we're looking

at now, what about this script?

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.

So when you opened this,

you immediately saw that Carolinian script.

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.

So we have a combination here.

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.

Where do you see Gothic features?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Makes it very hard

to rule an empire then.

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.

Why?

We don't know.

(laughs) Fair enough.

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.

It gets harder and harder to read,

I would imagine.

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.

Did that make the books

more cheap to produce?

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?

And I imagine we don't

know the answer--

We don't know the answer to that one.