Black-letter
| Latin script (Blackletter hand) |
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| Type | |
| Languages | European languages |
|
Time period
|
12th century – 1946 |
|
Parent systems
|
Latin script
|
|
Child systems
|
Fraktur,¹ Kurrentschrift, including Sütterlin |
| Direction | Varies |
| ISO 15924 | Latf, 217 |
1D504–1D537² |
|
Blackletter, also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 to well into the 17th century. It continued to be used for the German language until the 20th century. Fraktur is a notable script of this type, and sometimes the entire group of Blackletter faces is incorrectly referred to as Fraktur. Blackletter is sometimes called Old English, but it is not to be confused with the Old English language, despite the popular, though mistaken, belief that the language was written with blackletter. The Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, language predates blackletter by many centuries, and was itself written in the insular script, or Futhorc runes before that.
Carolingian minuscule was the direct ancestor of blackletter. Blackletter developed from Carolingian as an increasingly literate 12th-century Europe required new books in many different subjects. New universities were founded, each producing books for business, law, grammar, history, and other pursuits, not solely religious works for which earlier scripts typically had been used.
These books needed to be produced quickly to keep up with demand. Carolingian, though legible, was time-consuming and labour-intensive to produce. Its large size consumed a lot of manuscript space in a time when writing materials were very costly. As early as the 11th century, different forms of Carolingian were already being used, and by the mid-12th century, a clearly distinguishable form, able to be written more quickly to meet the demand for new books, was being used in northeastern France and the Low Countries.
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Wikipedia