SOMETIMESHOWYOUDOSOMETHINGISASIMPORTANTASWHAT
YOUDOITWITHTHISWOULDBEHARDTOREADONSTONEMONUMENTS
ORACOMPUTERSCREEN
Sorry - was that hard to read? Nowadays we would write it, "Sometimes how you do something is as important as what you do it with. This would be hard to read on stone monuments or a computer screen."
We take for granted the customary tools of capital and lower case letters, of spaces between words and punctuation. These tools though were not known to the Greeks or the Romans, whose manuscripts looked more like the first lines.
Shortly before 800 a new calligraphy developed that combined upper and lower case with letter forms that were clear and consistent. The resulting writing was more legible than much of what had gone before. Charlemagne put such a premium on improving this aspect of his kingdom that he brought over Alcuin of York to head the imperial schools and standardize the writing of manuscripts.
Scholars during the Carolingian Renaissance sought out and copied in the new legible standardized hand many Roman texts that had been wholly forgotten. Most of our knowledge of classical literature now derives from copies made in the scriptoria of Charlemagne. Over 7000 manuscripts written in Carolingian script survive from the 8th and 9th centuries alone.
Carolingian minuscule was definitely part of the effective bureaucracy that allowed the Carolingians to function so well, but it was more. Charlemagne and to a lesser extent his heirs valued secular learning, and set the monks to copying as many of the classical texts as they could recover or borrow. How much difference did that make?
Charlemagne encouraged the production of manuscripts, and his library contained the largest collection of books of his day. He sent for books from Monte Cassino and Rome to fill gaps in his library or to improve the accuracy of texts he already owned. It is salutary to note that 90 percent of all classical Latin literature is only known to us via Carolingian manuscript copies.
More over the flowing orange Carolingian scroll ~
Wikipedia on Carolingian minuscule
Origins at Corbie Abbey?
More on the origins of Carolingian minuscule
The spread of Carolingian minuscule, with maps
Some illustrations
Modernist?
A convenient summary of Greek and Latin learning that provides context for the Carolingian renaissance
Watch it written! (a good scribe can do this much faster, though)