Research Paper On Charlemagne

“Charles the Great”

HUM 2223 201610

Juliana Correa

10/01/2015

Word Count: “Charles the Great”

Charlemagne was a Roman Emperor in 800 AD. Inheriting the Frankish kingdom from his father, along with his brother Carloman. Since Carloman died in 771, Charlemagne then inherited the entire kingdom (Sparks). Charlemagne was responsible for the Carolingian Renaissance. This Renaissance helped establish schools so the people and especially the priests and bishops to read the religious texts. Writing used to be difficult to read before the Renaissance, and important religious texts were being fixed from errors.

Charlemagne helped to establish schools during the Carolingian Renaissance. He feared the decay of the Latin language. Mostly because since the religious texts were copied by hand, the scribes were to make mistakes and the people would also often mispronounce the Latin Language, becoming

Words were very hard to read because the Romans and those after them, never put spaces between individual words. “They just wrote one long string of letters all the way across the page, and when they got to a random point stopped, and started again on the next line” (Sparks). Writing almost entirely in upper case, there was no way to tell where a sentence was ending or beginning. The Carolingians revolutionized the way the people wrote, making written texts easier to read by introducing spaces between words, uppercase and lowercase letters and using punctuation (Sparks). This was also the beginning of the Medieval Church’s tradition of copying manuscripts, resulting in almost nothing from the Carolingian era being lost, before this time, works of Rome have been lost (“Welcome to the High”). There were various types of handwriting that had emerged in the kingdoms, so they developed the Carolingian Miniscule, which was the new form of handwriting and it is the exact same one we use today, very clear and uniform