Beschreibung:
<jats:p>During the first and second centuries A. D., Roman cursive developed a system of ligatures between letters that was to remain virtually unchallenged until a new cursive structure came about in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This remarkably coherent system was based on top-down connections, in the form of angular joins between the last, horizontal stroke of one letter and the first, vertical and downward stroke of the next; but from the outset different combinations, although sporadic, even exceptional, are evidence that other solutions were technically possible, namely bottom-up connections, particularly between vertical strokes. Why, then, was a broad range of artifices developed to enable the use of top-down, angular connections even with letters whose «natural» forms were incompatible, instead of resorting more widely to upstrokes? Mainly because this type of ligature was quite similar to the manner in which scribes tended to arrange the strokes constituting letters; the ligatures were consistent with a certain organisation of handwriting, which they in turn conditioned. This is all the more apparent in the fourth century when the structure of cursive letter forms and ligatures both developed in the same direction: although bottom-up connections remained relatively scarce and specific to certain variant letter forms (quite different in nature from medieval cursive ligatures), they henceforth became part of the system.</jats:p>