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Г-um uicrum au<-‘_corif»îciui po
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(Csf5 Figure 1.4 This leaf from a Bible, circa 800 ad, shows the use of
Carolingian minuscule lettering, word spacing, litterae notabiliores to mark
paragraphs, and various marks of punctuation, including ampersands.

called attention to quotations from sacred scripture, leading in turn to
quotation marks (“ ” ) and guillemets* the speech marks used in many
non-English languages (« » ).3’ The technology of writing changed too:
far from the reed beds of the Nile delta, religious scholars of north¬
ern Europe forsook rough Egyptian papyrus for smooth animal-skin
parchment, freeing their scribes to create a variety of flowing “uncial,”
or “inch-high” scripts.32

In the eighth century the first chinks of light appeared in the claus¬
trophobic scriptio continua that had dominated writing for a millen¬
nium. English and Irish priests, in an attempt to help readers decipher

* See chapter 10, “Quotation Marks f ”),” for more details.

THE PILCROW ?»■ 13

texts written in unfamiliar Latin, began to add spaces between
words.33 Also in the eighth century, the crusading Frankish king Char¬
lemagne commissioned the first standard lowercase letters to create a
unified script that all his literate subjects could read. No longer bound
to the solemn, square “majuscules” that suited the stonemason’s
chisel, the monk Alcuin of York used the scribe’s dexterous quill to
massage the Holy Roman Empire’s divergent regional scripts into a
single lowercase alphabet known as Carolingian minuscule. Sporting
distinctive ascenders, descenders, and flourishes, Alcuin’s script is the
direct progenitor of today’s lowercase roman letterforms.34

Amid all this innovation and consolidation, the paragraph mark
finally, truly, arrived: the pilcrow came about in the fertile, scholastic
world of the monastic scriptorium.

* * *

Just as the Latin word kaput stood for a section or paragraph, so
later the diminutive capitulum, or “little head,” came to be used
in the same fashion. Even though the Roman letter С had all but seen
off the older Etruscan Aby 300 вс, the orphaned A foretti persisted
in written documents for centuries more.35 By the twelfth century,
though, С for capitulum had taken K’s job, and many of the religious
documents that formed the bulk of Western civilization’s written
works were studded with C’s dividing them neatly into capitula, or
“chapters.”36

The interdependence of Christianity and the written word is
nowhere better illustrated: С for capitulum was enthusiastically
adopted by the monks who painstakingly copied the Church’s books,
and their use of capitulum to denote a section of a written work ulti¬
mately gave us the name and concept of the “chapter.” Capitulum and
“chapter” were so closely identified with ecclesiastical documents that
they soon permeated Church terminology in a bewildering number