blackletter
Sign in to saveBlackletter (also black letter or sometimes black-letter; sometimes popularly known as Gothic minuscule or Gothic type) was originally a medieval book hand (Textualis or Textura) of the Gothic family of scripts, later adapted into typefaces and still used in modern calligraphy and typesetting.
Key facts
- Writing system.name
- Blackletter
- Writing system.altname
- Gothic Textualis, Textura
- Writing system.type
- Alphabet
- Writing system.qid
- Q148443
- Writing system.time
- 12th–17th century (as late as 20th century in Germany)
- Writing system.caption
- The highest grade Gothic Textualis Prescissa book hand of the Malmsbury Abbey Vulgate, written in Belgium in 1407.
- Writing system.languages
- Western and Northern European languages
- Writing system.fam1
- Latin script
- Writing system.fam2
- Carolingian minuscule
- Writing system.fam3
- Gothic
- Writing system.children
- Fraktur (Fraktur and blackletter are sometimes used interchangeably) Kurrentschrift including Sütterlin
- Writing system.iso15924
- Latf
- Writing system.unicode
- 1D504–1D537, with some exceptions (see below)
- Writing system.sample
- Calligraphy.malmesbury.bible.arp.jpg
via Wikipedia infobox
Article
14 sectionsContents
- Etymology
- Handwriting Script
- Blackletter typesetting
- Forms
- Schwabacher
- Fraktur
- Donatus-Kalender
- Modern use
- Unicode
- Gallery
- See also
- References
- Further reading
- External links
Blackletter (also black letter or sometimes black-letter; sometimes popularly known as Gothic minuscule or Gothic type) was originally a medieval book hand (Textualis or Textura) of the Gothic family of scripts, later adapted into typefaces and still used in modern calligraphy and typesetting.
The book script was used throughout Western Europe from approximately the late 12th until the 17th century. It continued to be commonly used for Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish until the 1870s, Finnish until the turn of the 20th century, Estonian and Latvian until the 1930s, and for the German language until the 1940s, when Adolf Hitler officially banned it in 1941. Fraktur is a notable script of this type, and sometimes the entire group of blackletter faces is referred to as Fraktur. Blackletter, although sometimes called Old English lettering, is not to be confused with the Old English language, which predates blackletter by many centuries and was written in the insular script or in Futhorc runes. Along with Italic type and Roman type, blackletter served as one of the major typefaces in the history of Western typography.