Identifying Caroline Script Characteristics in the Dating of Early Medieval Leonese Documentation

Abstract

This article examines documentation from the Kingdom of León between the ninth and eleventh centuries with the purpose of identifying Caroline script features. Specifically, I will look at the collections of the Cathedral and the monasteries of Sahagún, Eslonza and Otero de las Dueñas in search of instances of the mpn spelling sequence. The considerable breadth of Leonese documentation in the early Middle Ages has made it possible to test the hypothesis of whether the mpn sequence is a Caroline feature or whether it is one shared by both the Visigothic and the Caroline scripts. The analysis of the data indicates that the mpn sequence appears in the Leonese Visigothic documents beginning in the mid eleventh century as a result of the introduction of the Caroline script. Additionally, by reviewing the published collections examined in this article, many transcription errors in the edition of several documents have been pointed out, and several documents, previously considered as tenth-century originals, have been classified as late eleventh-century copies. The results of this research contribute to the description of the substitution process of the Visigothic script by the Caroline script in the Iberian Peninsula.