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Post 5 of 5 Marked by a wide variety of usage and style, Italic scripts such as Cancelleresca (Chancery) and Mercantesca (Merchant) developed in 14th century Italy for use among merchants, notaries, and public servants. Eventually, both scripts became common in Renaissance literary works. Wealthy merchants commissioned fine illuminated  manuscripts of vernacular poetry or prose in Cancelleresca Formata, and printers imported Italica into their new print culture. We see the C

Louise Young lives along the Amnicon River in a Finnish community known as Outer Mongolia. On her way there, she worked on an assembly line that produced Jovan Musk perfume (“Get It On!”), gave birth to a tour company that arranged home stays on Panama’s San Blas Islands with the indigenous Kuna people, mooned a mountain goat, earned a master’s degree in botany, wrote a novel that Publisher’s Weekly selected as their “Pick of the Week,” listened to cow elk hum lullabies to th

Part 1 of 5  How often do you think about the mechanics of writing? Ink marking paper, typing fingers summoning words to a screen through a technical combination of hardware and software. We perform these actions so often, questions of their origin rarely cross our minds. But long before ink or wood pulp paper, there were clay tablets and reeds. The ancient Mesopotamians used these tools to write Hammurabi’s law code and the Epic of Gilgamesh. But a lengthy history of increme

Part 2 of 5 Alcuin of York, advisor to Charlemagne and master of the palace school, developed Caroline miniscule to promote Latin language literacy across the Carolingian empire. This script became standard for copying all texts beginning in the 8th century. The script standardized features like its use of spaces between words, and ascenders and descenders on letters like ‘d’ and ‘p’. With its clear and legible forms, this script increased literacy throughout Europe, especial

Part 3 of 5 As monasteries began to share the propagation of learning with scholastic universities through the later Middle Ages, a new script rose in popularity. Developed in the early 12th century, Textura Quadrata packs letters and words closely together so that they look like woven cloth. “Textura” means “woven” in Latin, and we get the word “textile” from it. The tight spacing decreased the cost of producing lengthy theological manuscripts by minimizing the amount of par

In the later middle ages, Bâtarde (also called “Secretary”) originated in the late 13th century for accurate record keeping, especially in courtrooms, and quickly established itself as a less formal but no less beautiful book hand for vernacular languages and secular topics, although we also see it in some French Missals or Books of Hours. Quasi-cursive, and faster to produce than Texturalis, Bâtarde features a greater variety of penstrokes than Texturalis, and allows for mor

My name is Justin Ciletti, and I am one of two student managers of the UMD Land Lab! I study Environmental Science, and I hope to go to...

Note: Hello! This is the first in a series of biography blogs about everyone who is key in bringing the Book of The North to life! Every...

This is the Book of The North, funded by the University of Minnesota Imagine Fund for Arts, Humanities, and Design. Planned for...