Older Roman italics

Excerpts from speeches in the Roman Senate, fragment of papyrus, 1st century AD

older (above) and younger (below) Roman italics in comparison

The older Roman cursive or Majuskelkursive (rarely Capitalis Cursiva ) is a cursive variant of the ancient Roman Capitalis typeface family.

Like all other variants of the Capitalis fonts is the capital cursive purely majuscule ( Versalschrift ). It was the everyday font for business documents and has come down to us in some papyri from the period between the 1st and 4th centuries.

The so-called “ b à panse gauche”, the b with the belly to the left, is typical of the older Roman cursive . In everyday use, the letters changed to arched shapes with long loops in the upper and lower zones, until an italic three-zone script ( minuscule ) developed from it ( younger Roman italics ).

Very fleeting notes were written on wax tablets . The Roman cursive was adapted to this writing material by changing the letters and thus became wax tablet writing .

See also : paleography

literature

• Bernhard Bischoff : Palaeography of Roman antiquity and the Western Middle Ages (= basics of German studies. 24). 2nd, revised edition. Erich Schmidt, Berlin 1986, ISBN 3-503-02253-8 , pp. 85-89.
• Ahasver von Brandt : tool of the historian. An introduction to the historical auxiliary sciences (= Kohlhammer-Urban-Taschenbücher. Vol. 33). 16th edition, with updated literature supplements and an afterword by Franz Fuchs . Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-17-017996-9 , p. 74.