Insular script was a

medieval 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 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 ...

system originating from

Ireland Ireland ( ; ga, Éire ; Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean, in north-western Europe. It is separated from Great Britain to its east by the North Channel, the Irish Sea, and St George's Channel. Ireland is the s ...

that spread to Anglo-Saxon England and continental Europe under the influence of Irish Christianity. Irish missionaries took the script to continental Europe, where they founded monasteries such as

Bobbio Bobbio ( Bobbiese: ; lij, Bêubbi; la, Bobium) is a small town and commune in the province of Piacenza in Emilia-Romagna, northern Italy. It is located in the Trebbia River valley southwest of the town Piacenza. There is also an abbey and a di ...

. The scripts were also used in monasteries like Fulda, which were influenced by English missionaries. They are associated with Insular art, of which most surviving examples are illuminated manuscripts. It greatly influenced

Irish orthography Irish orthography is very etymological which allows the same written form to represent all dialects of Irish and remain regular. For example, ("head") may be read in Mayo and Ulster, in Galway, or in Munster. A spelling reform in the mid- ...

and modern Gaelic scripts in handwriting and

typeface A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are thousands o ...

s. Insular script comprised a diverse family of scripts used for different functions. At the top of the hierarchy was the Insular

half-uncial Uncial is a majuscule Glaister, Geoffrey Ashall. (1996) ''Encyclopedia of the Book''. 2nd edn. New Castle, DE, and London: Oak Knoll Press & The British Library, p. 494. script (written entirely in capital letters) commonly used from the 4th to ...

(or "Insular majuscule"), used for important documents and sacred text. The full

uncial Uncial is a majuscule Glaister, Geoffrey Ashall. (1996) ''Encyclopedia of the Book''. 2nd edn. New Castle, DE, and London: Oak Knoll Press & The British Library, p. 494. script (written entirely in capital letters) commonly used from the 4th to ...

, in a version called "English uncial", was used in some English centres. Then "in descending order of formality and increased speed of writing" came "set

minuscule 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 minuscule" and "current minuscule". These were used for non-scriptural texts, letters, accounting records, notes, and all the other types of written documents.

Origin

The scripts developed in Ireland in the 7th century and were used as late as the 19th century, though its most flourishing period fell between 600 and 850. They were closely related to the

and

scripts, their immediate influences; the highest grade of Insular script is the majuscule Insular half-uncial, which is closely derived from Continental half-uncial script.

Appearance

Works written in Insular scripts commonly use large initial letters surrounded by red ink dots (although this is also true of other

scripts 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 handw ...

written in Ireland and England). Letters following a large initial at the start of a paragraph or section often gradually diminish in size as they are written across a line or a page, until the normal size is reached, which is called a "diminuendo" effect, and is a distinctive Insular innovation, which later influenced Continental illumination style. Letters with ascenders (''b'', ''d'', ''h'', ''l'', etc.) are written with triangular or wedge-shaped tops. The bows of letters such as ''b'', ''d'', ''p'', and ''q'' are very wide. The script uses many ligatures and has many unique

scribal abbreviation Scribal abbreviations or sigla (singular: siglum) are abbreviations used by ancient and medieval scribes writing in various languages, including Latin, Greek, Old English and Old Norse. In modern manuscript editing (substantive and mechanica ...

s, along with many borrowings from

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 ...

. Insular script was spread to England by the

Hiberno-Scottish mission The Hiberno-Scottish mission was a series of expeditions in the 6th and 7th centuries by Gaelic missionaries originating from Ireland that spread Celtic Christianity in Scotland, Wales, England and Merovingian France. Celtic Christianity spr ...

; previously, uncial script had been brought to England by Augustine of Canterbury. The influences of both scripts produced the Insular script system. Within this system, the palaeographer Julian Brown identified five grades, with decreasing formality: *Insular half-uncial, or "Irish majuscule": the most formal; became reserved for

rubric A rubric is a word or section of text that is traditionally written or printed in red ink for emphasis. The word derives from the la, rubrica, meaning red ochre or red chalk, and originates in Medieval illuminated manuscripts from the 13th cen ...

s (highlighted directions) and other displays after the 9th century. *Insular hybrid minuscule: the most formal of the minuscules, came to be used for formal church books when use of the "Irish majuscule" diminished. *Insular set minuscule *Insular cursive minuscule *Insular current minuscule: the least formal; ''current'' here means ‘running’ (rapid). Brown has also postulated two phases of development for this script, Phase II being mainly influenced by Roman Uncial examples, developed at Wearmouth-Jarrow and typified by the

Lindisfarne Gospels The Lindisfarne Gospels (London, British Library Cotton MS Nero D.IV) is an illuminated manuscript gospel book probably produced around the years 715–720 in the monastery at Lindisfarne, off the coast of Northumberland, which is now in the B ...

Usage

Insular script was used not only for

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

religious books, but also for every other kind of book, including vernacular works. Examples include the Book of Kells, the Cathach of St. Columba, the Ambrosiana Orosius, the Durham Gospel Fragment, the

Book of Durrow The Book of Durrow is an illuminated manuscript dated to c. 700 that consists of text from the four Gospels gospel books, written in an Irish adaption of Vulgate Latin, and illustrated in the Insular script style.Moss (2014), p. 229 Its origin ...

, the

Durham Gospels The Durham Gospels is a very incomplete late 7th-century insular Gospel Book, now kept in the Durham Cathedral Dean and Chapter Library (MS A.II.17). A single folio of this manuscript is now in Magdalene College, Cambridge (Pepysian MS 2981). ...

, the

Echternach Gospels The Echternach Gospels (Paris, Bib. N., MS. lat. 9389) were produced, presumably, at Lindisfarne Abbey in Northumbria around the year 690. This location was very significant for the production of Insular manuscripts, such as the Durham Gospels ...

, the

Lichfield Gospels The Lichfield Gospels (recently more often referred to as the St Chad Gospels, but also known as the Book of Chad, the Gospels of St Chad, the St Teilo Gospels, the Llandeilo Gospels, and variations on these) is an 8th-century Insular Gospel ...

, the St. Gall Gospel Book, and the

Book of Armagh The ''Book of Armagh'' or Codex Ardmachanus (ar or 61) ( ga, Leabhar Ard Mhacha), also known as the ''Canon of Patrick'' and the ''Liber Ar(d)machanus'', is a 9th-century Irish illuminated manuscript written mainly in Latin. It is held by the L ...

. Insular script was influential in the development of

Carolingian minuscule Carolingian minuscule or Caroline minuscule is a script which developed as a calligraphic standard in the medieval European period so that the Latin alphabet of Jerome's Vulgate Bible could be easily recognized by the literate class from one reg ...

in the

scriptoria Scriptorium (), literally "a place for writing", is commonly used to refer to a room in medieval European monasteries devoted to the writing, copying and illuminating of manuscripts commonly handled by monastic scribes. However, lay scribes and ...

of the Carolingian empire. In Ireland, Insular script was superseded in 850 by Late Insular script; in England, it was followed by a form of

Caroline minuscule Carolingian minuscule or Caroline minuscule is a script which developed as a calligraphic standard in the medieval European period so that the Latin alphabet of Jerome's Vulgate Bible could be easily recognized by the literate class from one r ...

. The

Tironian 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 ...

''et'' — equivalent of ampersand (&) — was in widespread use in the script (meaning ''agus'' ‘and’ in Irish and ''ond'' ‘and’ in

Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th c ...

) and is occasionally continued in modern

Gaelic type Gaelic type (sometimes called Irish character, Irish type, or Gaelic script) is a family of Insular script typefaces devised for printing Classical Gaelic. It was widely used from the 16th until the mid-18th century (Scotland) or the mid-20th ...

faces derived from Insular script.

Unicode

Unicode treats representation of letters of 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 th ...

written in insular script as a typeface choice that needs no separate coding. Only a few Insular letters have specific code-points because they are used by phonetic specialists. To render the full alphabet correctly, a suitable

display font A display typeface is a typeface that is intended for use at large sizes for headings, rather than for extended passages of body text. Display typefaces will often have more eccentric and variable designs than the simple, relatively restrained ...

should be chosen. To display the specialist characters, there are several fonts that may be used; three free ones that support these characters are

Junicode Junicode ("Junius-Unicode") is a free (SIL Open Font License) old-style serif typeface developed by Peter S. Baker of the University of Virginia. The design is based on a 17th-century typeface used in Oxford, England. Junicode contains many spe ...

, Montagel, and

Quivira Quivira is a place named by Spanish conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado in 1541, for the mythical Seven Cities of Gold that he never found. Quivira was a province of the ancestral Wichita people, located near the Great Bend of the Arkans ...

. Gentium and Charis SIL support the alphabetic letters (U+A77x and U+A78x). According to

Michael Everson Michael Everson (born January 9, 1963) is an American and Irish linguist, script encoder, typesetter, type designer and publisher. He runs a publishing company called Evertype, through which he has published over a hundred books since 2006. H ...

, in the 2006 Unicode proposal for these characters:

References

Sources

* O'Neill, Timothy. ''The Irish Hand: Scribes and Their Manuscripts From the Earliest Times''. Cork: Cork University Press, 2014.

External links

An Insular minuscule as a

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...

font (strictly speaking, a Carolingian minuscule with a set of Insular variants) {{list of writing systems Culture of medieval Scotland Early medieval literature Latin-script calligraphy Medieval scripts Texts of medieval Ireland

Origin

Appearance

Usage

Unicode

See also

References

Sources

Further reading

External links