A closer look
Charlemagne's vast European empire was suffering from an epidemic of truly terrible handwriting. Before the 8th century, overworked monks copied Bibles using cramped, highly localized scripts so chaotic that priests were accidentally reciting mutated, heretical gibberish during church mass. To fix this intellectual disaster, the scholar Alcuin of York led a massive scriptorium effort to systematically correct corrupted manuscripts and standardize them using 'Caroline Minuscule,' a revolutionary, highly legible font featuring actual spaces between words.
