The Court School of Charlemagne and its Emphasized Script

Paleographical and art historical methods are used to examine the quality and preparation of parchment, page format, script, text, and particularly the ornament, structure, and placement of evangelist portraits and canonical text beginning pages within the gospel books of the Court School of Charlemagne. Each gospel manuscript is analyzed as an individual whole and as a part of the group. A new nomenclature for the different types of emphasized script is proposed and the unknown figures in the initial medallions are identified. The study presents a history of the problems of luxury manuscript production in the Court School scriptorium and their successful and rejected solutions.