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peter a. stokes. English Vernacular Minuscule from Æthelred to Cnut, c . 990 – c. 1035.

2015; Oxford University Press; Volume: 66; Issue: 276 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/res/hgv014

1471-6968

Patrick Conner,

Historical and Archaeological Studies

Large organized scriptoria, royal chancelleries, small writing offices, and everything in between participated in a remarkable development between circa 990 and circa 1035: these writing places shared a canonical script which survives in some 500 documents, including the Beowulf manuscript, the ‘Junius Manuscript’, the works of Ælfric and Wulfstan, and at least two manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as well as numerous diplomas, writs and wills. English Vernacular minuscule, as Peter A. Stokes aptly names this shared script, was grounded in the earlier English Square minuscule script and prevailed in writing English from the middle of Æthelred’s troubled reign in the 990s through the end of King Cnut’s rule in 1035. The very close, expert analysis Stokes gives us of this script is important for many reasons, including dating, localizing, and editing the works written in it of course, but the identity of a single national script in two developmental phases which bridges a period as politically and socially diverse as that from the close of the tenth century through the first third of the eleventh century in England is of special importance. Scripts need to be passed down from one master of the script to its next practitioner; the stability in the writing office required for this to happen as regularly as it happened in the development and perpetuation of English Vernacular minuscule in the early eleventh century suggests stability of the cultural institutions of the period which used this script, both religious and sociopolitical. An upgraded version of English Vernacular minuscule was employed in the finest liturgical manuscripts and a similarly standardized variant—not downgraded as such but changed in aspect to accommodate the space in which it was written—which was apparently used by the glossators of the period while other hands categorized in the same English Vernacular minuscule script are found repeatedly throughout other English works. A particularly interesting point is not that English was written in this script and Latin in another script, a bit more influenced by Caroline minuscule, but that English Vernacular minuscule carries with it a history that can be traced for some of its letter forms all the way back to the great insular Gospel books. English Vernacular minuscule trumpets English ethnicity right through the Danish interregnum. I do not think we would be going too far to see it as one of the things that maintain Englishness when many of the King’s men as well as the King himself looked towards Denmark; there is an obvious parallel with Beowulf, a tale drawn from Danish materials, written in English, and partly preserved in English Vernacular minuscule.