8 TYPE
the shift to the rounded letterforms of Roman majuscule (upper case) from the square, hammer-and-chiseled letters associated with Greek and Roman monumental stone work (see fig. 2.4). Further, the durable and portable vellum scroll could be carried to the furthest outposts of the empire, where local variations in penmanship crept in to influence the standard forms of Greek and Roman letters. In addition to the stone tablet and the scroll, short Classical texts were also written on temporary wax tablets, six or seven of which could be bundled together into a codex. These bundled codices would evolve into modern books—bundled, folded leaves bound at one side. The majority of Classical codices were temporary texts such as school notebooks, but a few collections of imperial laws or constitutions in the first century bce took the form of the codex. The Christian Church, eager to distinguish its books from the common scroll forms of pagan writings, adopted the vellum codex as its textual medium by the second century ce. The codex, like the scroll, was highly portable and durable, and thus it was transported efficiently to distant Roman towns, where Christians were spreading their gospel. Nevertheless, the rigors and dangers of the early medieval era isolated people linguistically. For the next several hundred years, the script styles and dialects of Latin evolved independently of each other. What had been Latin dialects evolved into the Romance languages: medieval French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. The independent processes of evolution were so sweeping that someone from Rome would find it almost impossible to read the script of England not only because it was a different language, but because the Latinate letters took vastly different forms in different languages. Between 800 and 1200, beginning with the efforts of Emperor Charlemagne (747–814 ce), standardized script was introduced throughout Europe. Allowing for greater legibility and common understanding among the linguistically isolated countries of Europe, this script would change how language was written in the West from that point forward. The most distinctive feature of the new script was
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