Script

LJS 101 is written in Caroline minuscule, one of two manuscripts in the University of Pennsylvania collections which uses this script. Caroline minuscule script was originally developed at the end of the eighth century and became the standard script across Western Europe over the course of the following century.

Although there are certain characteristics which define Caroline minuscule in general, there are also temporal, geographical, and personal variations. LJS 101 exhibits all three. The majority of the manuscript (fol. 5r - fol. 44v) uses a version of Caroline minuscule usually dated to the ninth century. A notable feature of this section is that there are only small spaces between words. The first four folios of the manuscript and the final 20 are written in another version of Caroline minuscule, found in manuscripts of the late tenth and eleventh centuries. These sections of the text use clear word separation.

In addition to these two major variations in the script, there are also more minor variations that might indicate different scribes at work, suggesting that the manuscript was produced by a team of scribes. This is a plausible scenario in an early medieval monastery, where it was common practice for several scribes to contribute to a single manuscript.

The two distinct scripts have led scholars to argue that the central section of the manuscript was made in the ninth century and then the first four folios and the last section were added almost two centuries later. However, the script can be an imprecise way to date the two sections as script variations could endure longer or develop earlier and the two sections could have been produced much closer together, perhaps in the tenth century.