Calligraphy (refers to Charlemagne’s reign) written in the Carolingian Minuscule hand. Calligraphy means “beautiful writing”. As a craft, it has seen better days than the one we live in, but there are still those of us who won’t let it die. Carolingian Minuscule was developed by English scholar Alcuin of York under the reign of Charlemagne. He created this hand to make liturgical and state documents more readily accessible to the public which was one of the accomplishments of the Carolingian Revolution.
For me, Carolingian Miniscule is the point of departure for the hands which tell my fairytale for several reasons. It symbolizes the thirst for knowledge in the form of curiosity. Charlemagne was illiterate, as were many were during his age. Many of the monks who penned the illuminated manuscripts in the Middle Ages, and beyond, were also illiterate. There is more to intelligence than being able to read or write. There are many kinds of intelligence. Although Charlemagne could not write, he had the enlightened wisdom to see how important written language is. He understood that for a society to work and be inclusive of “every man”, there had to be accountability. For that to happen, there had to be a trusted and readable hand. As The Universal Fairytale grows, I will be confronted with how to adapt languages I do not know. I will spend years in the position of the monks who were blind to the text they scribed and illuminated. Already, with the languages I’ve interpreted, I’m mostly out of my depth. Despite this, I can work with any language reasonably well because the common ground/hand is that the story remains the same.
These are some of the basic reasons why I use Carolingian Miniscule.