Editing Palaeography (section)

==== Pre-Caroline ====
James J. John points out that the disappearance of imperial authority around the end of the 5th century in most of the Latin-speaking half of the Roman Empire does not entail the disappearance of the Latin scripts, but rather introduced conditions that would allow the various provinces of the West gradually to drift apart in their writing habits, a process that began around the 7th century.<ref>{{cite book |first=James J. |last=John |chapter=Latin Paleography |editor-first=J. |editor-last=Powell |title=Medieval Studies : An Introduction |edition=2nd |location=Syracuse |publisher=[[Syracuse University Press]] |year=1992 |pages=15–16 |isbn=0-8156-2555-3 }}</ref>

[[Pope Gregory I]] (Gregory the Great, d. 604) was influential in the spread of Christianity to Britain and also sent Queens Theodelinde and Brunhilda, as well as Spanish bishops, copies of manuscripts. Furthermore, he sent the Roman monk [[Augustine of Canterbury]] to Britain on a missionary journey, on which Augustine may have brought manuscripts. Although Italy's dominance as a centre of manuscript production began to decline, especially after the [[Gothic War (535–554)]] and the invasions by the [[Lombards]], its manuscripts—and more important, the scripts in which they were written—were distributed across Europe.<ref>See {{cite book |first=Bernhard |last=Bischoff |author-link=Bernhard Bischoff |title=Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages |translator-first=Daibi O |translator-last=Croinin |translator2-first=David |translator2-last=Ganz |location=Cambridge |publisher=[[Cambridge University Press]] |year=1990 |pages=83–112; 190–202 |isbn=0-521-36473-6 }}</ref>

From the 6th through the 8th centuries, a number of so-called 'national hands' were developed throughout the Latin-speaking areas of the former Roman Empire. By the late 6th century Irish scribes had begun transforming Roman scripts into Insular minuscule and majuscule scripts. A series of transformations, for book purposes, of the cursive documentary script that had grown out of the later Roman cursive would get under way in France by the mid-7th century. In Spain half-uncial and cursive would both be transformed into a new script, the Visigothic minuscule, no later than the early 8th century.<ref>{{Harvnb|John|1992|p=16}}.</ref>