Younger Roman italics
The younger Roman cursive or minuscule cursive is the first minuscule font of the Latin script development.
It developed from the older Roman italic and was used from the late 4th century until the early Middle Ages.
It is an italic font (also business font). The letters are mostly connected to each other, so you could write them very quickly and therefore used them for everyday business or official purposes, ie for letters, files, documents or notes. It was written with a stylus on wax tablets or with ink on papyrus or (more rarely) parchment.
A novelty compared to older fonts is that the letters are not all the same height, but some of them have ascenders or descenders. This is the first time the principle of minuscule writing has been developed. The younger Roman cursive is therefore the root of all later lowercase scripts.
literature
- 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.
- Bernhard Bischoff : Paleography of Roman antiquity and the Western Middle Ages (= basics of German studies. 4). 4th revised and expanded edition. With a selection bibliography 1986–2008 by Walter Koch . Erich Schmidt, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-503-09884-2 , pp. 88-91.