black letter

black letter, in calligraphy, a style of alphabet that was used for manuscript books and documents throughout Europe—especially in German-speaking countries—from the end of the 12th century to the 20th century. It is distinguished by a uniform treatment of vertical strokes that end on the baseline (e.g., in b or l), the use of angular lines instead of smooth curves and circles (e.g., for b, d, o, or p), and the fusion of convex forms when they occur together (e.g., as bo, pa, and the like).

When printing by movable type was invented, typefaces were based on the book manuscript styles of the time. Black letter and revised Carolingian roman were the two dominant letter shapes of medieval typography. Black-letter type was used in the only extant work known to have been printed by Johannes Gutenberg, the 42-line Bible. Eventually, roman type, which was considered more legible by humanists, superseded black letter throughout Europe, except in Germany; there it persisted until 1941, when the Nazi government forbade its use. Black-letter typography persists in the 21st century mainly in the Old English calligraphy or type used for diplomas, certificates, liturgical printing, and newspaper mastheads.

Kanzlei (“chancery”) was a cursive (connected) black-letter style used in medieval Germany. Similar cursives were used in the Netherlands, France, and England, where it was known as the secretary hand, a translation of its French name, secretaire. Lettre françoise was another cursive black-letter style of script that was used in France during the Middle Ages. During the Renaissance it became a printing type, cut by the Parisian artist Robert Granjon. The typeface became known as civilité because it was used to print a popular children’s book, La Civilité puerile (1536), which was written by the humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus. The typeface was also used in a 16th-century Flemish handwriting book, Nouvel exemplaire pour apprendre à escrire (1565; “New Copy for Learning to Write”). A late black-letter cursive is the 17th-century lettre financière, which became an officially approved script under the patronage of Louis XIV.

Littera moderna was the name 15th-century humanists used for rotunda, a black letter used in medieval Italian books. Rounder than German versions, littera moderna is characterized by rounded forms that overlap to create pointed intersections. Littera merchantile was a black-letter cursive used by medieval Italian merchants.

Black-letter hands were called Gothic by the “modernist” Lorenzo Valla and others in mid-15th-century Italy. The modernists rejected these scripts because they associated them with the Middle Ages, which they considered a long intellectual deviation that separated their generation from the standards of the Classical age. The rejection of the scripts began with the poet Petrarch and became calligraphically manifest with the writing innovations of Coluccio di Salutati, Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini, and Niccolò Niccoli in Florence in the first quarter of the 15th century.