Johannine script () was a historical style of handwriting used in the Portuguese Royal

Chancery Chancery may refer to: Offices and administration * Court of Chancery, the chief court of equity in England and Wales until 1873 ** Equity (law), also called chancery, the body of jurisprudence originating in the Court of Chancery ** Courts of e ...

starting around the reign of

John I John I may refer to: People Religious figures * John I (bishop of Jerusalem) * John Chrysostom (349 – c. 407), Patriarch of Constantinople * John I of Antioch (died 441) * Pope John I of Alexandria, Coptic Pope from 496 to 505 * Pope John I, P ...

(1385–1433) that was used until the reign of

Manuel I Manuel I may refer to: *Manuel I Komnenos Manuel I Komnenos (; 28 November 1118 – 24 September 1180), Latinized as Comnenus, also called Porphyrogenitus (; " born in the purple"), was a Byzantine emperor of the 12th century who reigned ov ...

(1495–1521). It is, thus, a national variation of

chancery hand The term "chancery hand" can refer to either of two distinct styles of historical handwriting. A chancery hand was at first a form of handwriting for business transactions that developed in the Lateran chancery (the ) of the 13th century, the ...

, a form of

blackletter Blackletter (sometimes black letter or black-letter), also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule or Gothic type, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 until the 17th century. It continued to be commonly used for ...

. Johannine script is essentially cursive, with a short corpus size (but with long ascenders and

descender In typography and handwriting, a descender is the portion of a grapheme that extends below the Baseline (typography), baseline of a typeface, font. For example, in the letter ''y'', the descender is the "tail", or that portion of the diagonal li ...

s), letters slope slightly to the right, words are clearly separated one from the other with no ligatures,

punctuation Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of writing, written text should be read (silently or aloud) and, consequently, understood. The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, c ...

is mostly absent, and

Arabic numerals The ten Arabic numerals (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9) are the most commonly used symbols for writing numbers. The term often also implies a positional notation number with a decimal base, in particular when contrasted with Roman numera ...

are not used (instead, numbers are given in full, or in

Roman numerals Roman numerals are a numeral system that originated in ancient Rome and remained the usual way of writing numbers throughout Europe well into the Late Middle Ages. Numbers are written with combinations of letters from the Latin alphabet, eac ...

). The shape of the letters ''v'' and ''b'' (and Roman numeral 5) are practically indistinguishable. Abbreviations are commonplace, mostly marked with an

overline An overline, overscore, or overbar, is a typographical feature of a horizontal and vertical, horizontal line drawn immediately above the text. In old mathematical notation, an overline was called a ''vinculum (symbol), vinculum'', a notation fo ...

and/or

superscript A subscript or superscript is a character (such as a number or letter) that is set slightly below or above the normal line of type, respectively. It is usually smaller than the rest of the text. Subscripts appear at or below the baseline, wh ...

. The prevailing script in documents from (and from the land that would eventually become) Portugal from the 8th to the 12th centuries was

Visigothic script Visigothic script was a type of medieval script that originated in the Visigothic Kingdom in Hispania (the Iberian Peninsula). Its more limiting alternative designations and associate it with scriptoria specifically in Toledo and with Moz ...

; from the mid-12th century onwards, for about a century,

Carolingian minuscule Carolingian minuscule or Caroline minuscule is a script which developed as a calligraphic standard in the medieval European period so that the Latin alphabet of Jerome's Vulgate Bible could be easily recognized by the literate class from one ...

and, later on, an incipient Gothic script. From 1385 onwards, that is, after

was crowned putting an end to the Portuguese Interregnum, there is radical change in the writing style of the documents issued by the Royal Chancery: this new script (first called "Johannine script" by paleographer ) has influences of the French and Gothic scripts. Notable scribes who wrote mostly on Johannine script include (), (), and ().

References

{{European calligraphy Handwriting script Western calligraphy