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the coining of new words while retaining the grammatical rules of classical Latin. Medieval Latin became a common language of scholarship and an early international language, allowing the educated to make themselves un- derstood across Europe. Along with these schools there was a flowering of libraries and manuscript book production.
During this period of “enlightenment” and relative stability of education- al and political institutions, scholars sought out and copied in the new leg- ible standardized Carolingian minuscule many Roman texts that had been wholly forgotten. As a result, much of our knowledge of classical literature derives from copies made in the scriptoria of Charlemagne and during the Carolingian Renaissance. The exemplars on which the Carolingian copies were based were discarded after copying, or otherwise lost. Roughly 7000 manuscripts written in Carolingian script survive from the 8th and 9th cen- turies alone, possibly because of the enhanced durability of these parchment copies relative to the earlier exemplars, which may have been papyrus rolls or papyrus codices, but primarily because of the comparative stability of in- stitutions after Charlemagne, even though many of Charlemagne’s political achievements and educational reforms did not long endure.
Even though the damp European climate was not conducive to the preser- vation of papyrus, papyrus was used for writing in Europe as late as the 11th century. Among the earliest surviving European papyrus codices is a copy of the writings of Saint Augustine, written in uncial script circa 550 CE, and divided between the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris no. 664 du fonds St-Germain latin or no. 11641) and the Bibliothèque de Genève. Interleaved parchment leaves protect the middle and the outside of the gath- erings. These may have contributed to its survival.92
After A.D. 677 the Merovingian chancellery used only parch- ment, but otherwise papyrus continued in use in France at least till 787. In the ninth century the papal chancellery was still being
92 The codex was described by Henri Bordier in “Restitution d’un manuscrit du sixième siècle mi-parti entre Paris et Genève contenant des lettres et des sermons de Saint Augustin,” Études paléo- graphiques et historiques sur des papyrus du VIme siècle en partie inédits refermant des homelies de Saint Avit et des écrits de Saint Augustin (1866), pp. 107-53, with one color plate comparing the two separated portions.
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