BLACK LETTER

also called Gothic Script, or Old English Script, in calligraphy, style of alphabet that was used for handwriting throughout Latin Christendom for about 500 years, from the decline of the literary reforms under Charlemagne in the early 9th century to the humanistic revival of the Renaissance. It is distinguished by a uniform treatment of vertical strokes that end on the baseline, the use of angular lines instead of smooth curves and circles, and the overlapping of convex forms so that they lie back to back. When printing by movable type was invented, typefaces were based on the handwriting styles of the time, and black letter, along with roman, was one of the two dominant letter shapes of medieval typography. Black-letter type was used in the only extant work known to have been printed by Johannes Gutenberg, the so-called 42-line Bible. Eventually, roman type, which was considered more suitable by humanists, superseded black letter throughout Europe, except in Germany (where it persisted until 1940, when Adolf Hitler ordered its discontinuance). Black letter persisted in the 20th century mainly in the Old English script used on diplomas, Christmas cards, and in some liturgical writings. Several styles of medieval black letter are recognized by their French or Latin names. Lettre de forme, or littera textualis formata, has the sharpest angles and most contrast between light and heavy strokes; lettre de somme is rounder and was widely used in southern Europe. Lettre franoise is a cursive (connected) black-letter style of script that was used in France during the Middle Ages. During the Renaissance it became a printing type, cut by the Parisian artist Robert Granjon. It became known as civilit because it was used to print a popular children's book, La Civilit puerile, written by Erasmus. During the 17th century, lettre financire became an officially approved script because it was a development from the old French national style, lettre franoise. Under the patronage of Louis XIV, this script became elegant, taking on dazzling Baroque line endings and flourishes. Littera moderna was an ordinary black-letter script used in medieval Italy. Littera antica was an Italian script developed by the humanists during the Renaissance. Littera a merchanti was another Italian scripta late medieval style that was used in the commercial centres of Italy in the 16th century. Cancelleresca corsiva (cancellaresca corsiva), also called littera da brevi, was developed in the 15th century out of the antica corsiva script used by the papal chancery. It was a popular script that became the vehicle for the New Learning throughout Christendom in the 16th century. Cancelleresca formata developed from cancelleresca corsiva. Lettre btarde, or littera bastarda, is a slashing, cursive style developed by professional writing masters of the 16th century. The most formal of the black-letter style is the German Fraktur. It has notably pointed and heavy-bodied letters. Typical examples were used in some of the earliest printing, including letters of indulgences printed in Mainz, Ger., in 1454. The style was taken into printing in its almost fully developed form and evolved little in succeeding years. Schwabacher was a less pointed, less heavy-bodied, rounded, and generally more informal typeface; it evolved slowly and was, for a brief time, the major black-letter form as a cursive, semi-italic. Some categories recognize a more informal cursive Schwabacher as a third form. The black-letter scripts were called gothic by the modernist Lorenzo Valla and others in the mid-15th century. The modernists rejected the black-letter scripts because they associated them with the Middle Ages, which they considered a long intellectual deviation that separated their generation from the standards of the Classical age. The rejection of the scripts began with Petrarch and became calligraphically manifest with Coluccio Salutati, Poggio Bracciolini, and Niccol Niccoli in Florence in the first quarter of the 15th century.