Roman cursive (or Latin cursive) is a form of

handwriting Handwriting is the writing done with a writing instrument, such as a pen or pencil, in the hand. Handwriting includes both printing and cursive styles and is separate from formal calligraphy or typeface. Because each person's handwriting is u ...

(or a

script Script may refer to: Writing systems * Script, a distinctive writing system, based on a repertoire of specific elements or symbols, or that repertoire * Script (styles of handwriting) ** Script typeface, a typeface with characteristics of ha ...

) used in

ancient Rome In modern historiography, ancient Rome refers to Roman people, Roman civilisation from the founding of the city of Rome in the 8th century BC to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD. It encompasses the Roman Kingdom ...

and to some extent into the

Middle Ages In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire ...

. It is customarily divided into old (or ancient) cursive and new cursive.

Old Roman cursive

Old Roman

cursive Cursive (also known as script, among other names) is any style of penmanship in which characters are written joined in a flowing manner, generally for the purpose of making writing faster, in contrast to block letters. It varies in functionali ...

, also called

majuscule Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (or more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (or more formally ''minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing ...

cursive and capitalis cursive, was the everyday form of handwriting used for writing letters, by merchants writing business accounts, by schoolchildren learning the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the ...

, and even by

emperors An emperor (from la, imperator, via fro, empereor) is a monarch, and usually the sovereign ruler of an empire or another type of imperial realm. Empress, the female equivalent, may indicate an emperor's wife ( empress consort), mother (empr ...

issuing commands. A more formal style of writing was based on

Roman square capitals Roman square capitals, also called ''capitalis monumentalis'', inscriptional capitals, elegant capitals and ''capitalis quadrata'', are an ancient Roman form of writing, and the basis for modern capital letters. Square capitals are characteriz ...

, but cursive was used for quicker, informal writing. Most inscriptions at

Pompeii Pompeii (, ) was an ancient city located in what is now the ''comune'' of Pompei near Naples in the Campania region of Italy. Pompeii, along with Herculaneum and many villas in the surrounding area (e.g. at Boscoreale, Stabiae), was burie ...

, conserved due to being buried in a volcanic eruption in 79 CE, are written in this script. It is most commonly attested from the 1st century BCE to the 3rd century CE,Oxford
Scripts at Vindolandapage 2page 3
/ref> but it likely existed earlier than that. The script uses many ligatures (see, e.g.,

Tironian notes Tironian notes ( la, notae Tironianae, links=no) are a set of thousands of signs that were formerly used in a system of shorthand (Tironian shorthand) dating from the 1st century BCE and named after Tiro, a personal secretary to Marcus Tullius Ci ...

), and some letters are hard to recognize – "a" looks like an uncial "a", but with the left stroke still straight, "b" and "d" are hard to distinguish, "e" is a full height letter (like the "s"), "p" and "t" are very similar, and "v" is written above the baseline, resembling a floating breve.

New Roman cursive

Roman letter, 4th century, Achillio Vitalis

New Roman cursive, also called minuscule cursive or later Roman cursive, developed from old Roman cursive. It was used from approximately the 3rd century to the 7th century, and uses letterforms that are more recognizable to modern readers: "a", "b", "d", and "e" have taken a more familiar shape, and the other letters are proportionate to each other rather than varying wildly in size and placement on the line. These letter forms would gradually evolve into various scripts with a more regional character by the 7th century, such as the

Visigothic script Visigothic script was a type of Middle Ages, medieval script (styles of handwriting), script that originated in the Visigoths, Visigothic kingdom in Hispania (the Iberian Peninsula, modern Andorra, Spain and Portugal). Its more limiting altern ...

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, the Beneventan script in southern Italy, or the

Merovingian script Merovingian script or Gallo-Roman script ( la, Scriptura Merovingica/Francogallica) was a medieval variant of the Latin script so called because it was developed in Gaul during the Merovingian dynasty. It was used in the 7th and 8th centuries bef ...

in northern

France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of Overseas France, overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic, Pacific Ocean, Pac ...

. They also formed part of the basis of the uncial and half-uncial scripts, particularly for the letters "a", "g", "r", and "s".Oxford
Scripts at Vindolanda: Historical context

Notes

References

* Jan-Olaf Tjäder, ''Die nichtliterarischen lateinischen Papyri Italiens aus der Zeit 445–700'' (Lund, 1955).
Vindolanda Tablets on lineCentre for the Study of Ancient Documents and the Academic Computing Development Team
at

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Old Roman cursive

New Roman cursive

See also

Notes

References

Further reading