Page 169 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

Traditionally it has been assumed that in Charlemagne’s time the Imperial Library of Constantinople—which would, in theory, have preserved, among other things, many texts copied from papyrus rolls in the Library of Al- exandria—was secure in the then-stable Byzantine Empire, well after the decline of Roman institutions. However, perhaps as a result of earlier or later destruction of this library, our knowledge of the Imperial Library of Constantinople and its contents is exceptionally limited.
At Aachen Alcuin also taught the Carolingian minuscule, which intro- duced the use of lower case letters and became the writing standard in Eu- rope for the eighth and ninth centuries. Efforts at reforming the crabbed Merovingian and Germanic hands had been attempted without great suc- cess before Alcuin arrived at Aachen. The new minuscule was disseminated first from Aachen and later from the influential scriptorium at Tours, where Alcuin retired as an abbot. With its uppercase and lowercase letters, Car- olingian minuscule was not only more legible, but by allowing more char- acters to be written on a page, was also more economical in its use of the very expensive parchment, and it may also have been written more rapidly than the traditional majuscule by experienced scribes. Though it was even- tually superseded by Gothic blackletter hands, Carolingian minuscule later seemed so classical to early Renaissance humanists in the fourteenth century that they mistook Carolingian manuscripts for ancient Roman originals and based their handwriting styles on the Carolingian model. Those Renais- sance hands, in turn, became the models for early Roman typefaces with their upper and lower case letters, the other models for the typefaces being Roman stone inscriptions which were entirely in capital letters.
In addition to reforming handwriting, Alcuin revised the church liturgy and the Bible and, along with another scholar, Theodulf of Orleans, was responsible for an intellectual movement within the Carolingian Empire in which many public schools became attached to monasteries and cathe- drals. For these schools Alcuin was responsible for writing textbooks and establishing a curriculum that included the trivium and quadrivium. Latin was restored as a literary language in a standardized form that allowed for
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