ABSTRACT
The principles of the new grammar of legibility were conveyed to the continent by scribes and books. Irish and Anglo-Saxon missionaries taught their scribal practices to pupils in new foundations where insular script flourished for many years. Anglo-Saxon manuscripts were copied by continental scribes who reproduced features of their exemplars. Books were produced on a scale without precedent, and Carolingian scribes copied a much wider range of texts than any previous generation of scribes. Continuous practice occasioned by the need to produce large quantities of books led to a rapid development of scribal skills. The improvement in scribal skills was accompanied by an interest in orthography and grammar, which is reflected in developments common to all the various local minuscule scripts. Scribes had developed a complex of new graphic conventions both to improve the intelligibility of texts copied in minuscule scripts, and to facilitate access to the information transmitted in the written medium.
