The Carolingian Renaissance

The story

Reading and writing had become difficult

In the 8th century, in the Frankish kingdom, almost nobody could write well. After the fall of the Roman Empire the schools had disappeared, except for a few in the monasteries. Even among priests, many no longer knew Latin and made grammar mistakes in the prayers. The scripts in use were messy: every region had its own, with distorted letters, shortened and joined to one another, hard to read even for monks.

Charlemagne, who had learned to read but never to write well, understood that a great kingdom needs educated people: it needed officials who could draw up documents, priests able to read the Gospel without mistakes, and judges who understood the laws. He decided to do something about it.

The palace school

Charles called the best scholars in Europe to his court: the Italian Paul the Deacon, the Goth Theodulf, his biographer Einhard, and above all an English monk from York, Alcuin, who arrived in 782 and ran the palace school at Aachen. The king's children, young nobles and even Charles himself studied there, for he was curious about everything: astronomy, grammar, rhetoric.

In 789 Charles issued a decree, the “Admonitio generalis”, in which he ordered that every monastery and every cathedral should open a school to teach reading, writing, singing and arithmetic. He wanted children to be able to learn to read and write in those schools. In practice it did not always work out that way, but it was an important first step. In 796 Alcuin was made abbot of the monastery of Saint Martin at Tours, in France, where he founded a scriptorium, that is, a room where monks copied books.

A new script

At Corbie and Tours, and in other monasteries, the copyists perfected a clear, tidy script: Carolingian minuscule. The letters are round and separate, with tall and short strokes clearly distinct; the words are divided by spaces, as Irish scribes had already done; there are full stops and commas to mark pauses; capital letters are used to begin sentences and proper names. In short, it looks very much like the writing we use today.

It was a great novelty: late-antique writing often had no spaces between words and no punctuation, in capital letters, and reading aloud in order to understand was not easy; Irish scribes, however, had already introduced spaces at the end of the 7th century, and the Carolingian script adopted them and made them the rule. Carolingian minuscule spread throughout the empire: the documents and books of Aachen, Tours and Corbie could be understood at a glance in Rome as in Cologne.

Everyday work in the scriptorium was regulated too. The monks wrote seated at a lectern, with a goose quill or a reed pen and a small knife to correct mistakes on the parchment. They worked only by daylight, to avoid burning the books with candles, and silence was compulsory. One copyist wrote at the end of a job that only three fingers hold the pen, but the whole body works.

Ancient books saved

The Carolingian monks did not copy only Christian texts. They also copied works by ancient authors: Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, Julius Caesar, Pliny. By a lucky chance, most of the ancient Latin texts we know today survived because they were copied in the monasteries of this age; the Roman originals, on papyrus or parchment, had almost all been lost.

In the 15th century the Italian humanists, who were searching for the books of the Romans, found old manuscripts in Carolingian minuscule and thought it was the writing of the ancient Romans. They adopted it, turned it into an elegant hand and then into printing types: this is where our lower-case printed letters come from, the “roman” type. It is a curious story: a script invented in the 9th century was mistaken for Roman, and today we have it in front of us every day.