Leaving the past behind, adapting to the future: Transitional and polygraphic visigothic-caroline minuscule scribes

Abstract

This article is concerned with the scribes who, in the early decades of the 9th century in the east of the Iberian Peninsula and of the 12th century in the north and north-west, came under a grea-ter or lesser degree of diplomatic pressure to change their graphic model from Visigothic script to Caroline minuscule. We will briefly discuss when and why each production centre, whether of longs-tanding or of new creation, adopted the new writing system that had come to dominate in Europe and how that change was implemented and perceived by their contemporaries. Special attention will be paid to scribes and copyists who reveal themselves to have been at the interface between the two cultural contexts by considering those very few extant examples of polygraphism in Latin writing in Iberia.