ABSTRACT
Map 35 offers a composite glance at (almost) all the scripts employed in Central Europe during the last two millennia, obviously with a clear focus on the second millennium CE, when the technology of writing became widespread across the region due to Christianization and, to a degree, Islamization. Both Christianity and Islam are scriptural religions, steeped in their respective “holy books,” each executed in a given language with the use of a specific script. By extension, traditionally, these languages and scripts were deemed as “holy” too. In premodern terms, when religion served as the leading ideology of statehood creation, legitimation, and maintenance, this officially sacred status translated into the high prestige of such “holy tongues” and “holy scripts.” Hence, when in the early modern period vernaculars began to be employed for written purposes and publishing, their users stuck to the script of their religion’s “holy tongue.” Subsequent secularization rarely dissolved this premodern scriptal link.
