The late Roman world transmitted to the elites of the 'new' barbarian kingdoms of the West a written language, Latin, and a set of alphabetical scripts as a medium both to fix narratives texts and to communicate their mutual political and economic relationships on documents on papyrus, and later on parchment. But an important legacy of the Late Roman Antiquity to the rarefied written world of the early medieval Europe was also a set of graphic signs and the practice of shorthand (the proper Tironiana script and various systems based on syllabic notes).

The paper aims at pointing out some cases, which represent further aspects of a dynamic survival of 'Roman' written forms, seen in the evidences of legal documents as well practical texts like private letters: the writing process in this field, unlike in that of the manuscripted books, involved people of different social and professional status, literates and illiterates too.

Source:School of History and Culture