The charm of Pfeffer Mediæval Font is not so much in its individual characters but rather in their proportions vis-à-vis one another. The typeface declares its own contrastive values with each letter decisively lower than the previous, each line right aligned. The lines all lead up to a stark serif at the top.
Designed by the awesome type designer Robert Pfeffer, Pfeffer Mediæval Font is the idealised image of a Carolingian minuscule, the script of Charlemagne, on which our modern Antiqua has been developed.
In the young kingdoms that had been founded on formerly Roman territory during the migration period, several so called Post-Roman scripts emerged up to the 8th century. These were already minuscule scripts using ascenders and descenders. Although all of them were derived from uncial, half uncial and new Roman cursive, they differed quite a lot regionally. Moreover, they were difficult to read, not least due to their extensive use of ligatures. Beginning from the end of the the 8th century a standardisation took place in the course of the Carolingian Renaissance. Advocated by Charlemagne and with important collaboration of Alcuin of York—who had responded to a call to Charlemagne’s palace school in Aachen—an easy to read script was developed that, beginning from the 9th century, quickly spread across the frankish scriptoria. This Carolingian minuscule became the common book and administrative script in the Carolingian empire and all over western Europe except Ireland, until it was in turn replaced by the Gothic minuscule script.
In England, where the new script took a very belated foothold, the insular minuscule script (one of the above mentioned Post-Roman scripts) was in coeval use up to the 12th century. This insular hand script primarily differs from the continental one in the shape of a few letters.
This font is extensive. The Pfeffer Mediæval font contains more than 800 glyphs. The Latin range includes numerous accented letters and additional characters for purposes of medieval philology. As far as the coverage reaches, the character mapping follows the recommendations of the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative. Among those additional characters are several insular variants of Latin letters, rendering Pfeffer Mediæval suitable for display of Old English texts as well.
This font also encompasses a Gothic and a Runic character set.
OpenType Features
Pfeffer Mediæval contains OpenType features for historical text layout, insular script and Gothic alphabet as well as for small capitals and particularly large capitals.
License Information on Pfeffer Mediæval Font
Pfeffer Mediæval font is available to download for free for personal use only. If you want to use it for commercial purposes, then you will need to gain permission from the creator.