In the eleventh century the minuscule of manuscripts was characterised by its angular forms, which caused it to receive the name of _Capetian_. Then the Capetian, exaggerated in its tendency towards its strokes and angles, became the _Ludovician_, which announces the thirteenth century, and characterises the reign of St. Louis. [Illustration: Fig. 335.--Scribe or Copyist, in his Work-room, surrounded by Open Manuscripts, and Writing at a Desk. (From a Miniature of the Fifteenth Century.)] However, manuscripts of the thirteenth century abound, and the history of the writing of the period of St. Louis and of the three centuries succeeding it, may be summed up in these words:--“The Capetian writing called _Ludovician_, when it had come to differ still more from the beautiful forms of the writings of Charlemagne’s time or the renovated Roman, was more and more deformed, and these successive degradations became so complicated that the writing, in the seventeenth century, resulted in being perfectly illegible. Thus can be generalised all the precepts relative to the state of writing, in the manuscripts and the charters in France, for this period of three hundred years” (Fig. 343). It was, however, the era of the richest manuscripts, that in which was brought to perfection the art of ornamenting them, when the pencil of the miniature-painter and the pen of the caligrapher, conjointly, produced some masterpieces (Fig. 344). This was also the time when the corporation of writers became numerous and powerful (Fig. 335). One of the most distinguished members of this society was that Nicholas Flamel, about whom so many fabulous legends have been invented. We give, as a specimen of his magnificent cursive writing (Fig. 345), the fac-simile of one of the _ex libris_ inscriptions he placed at the beginning of all the books belonging to Duke Jean de Berry, whose secretary and _bookseller_ he was.[56] In other countries than France, in Germany especially, Gothic writing was easily diffused. German manuscripts differ little from those of France. We observe only that German writing continued to be very fine till the middle of the thirteenth century, at which period it became irregular, angular, and bristling with sharp points. That which has just been said of Germany in particular is naturally applicable to East and West Flanders, and to the Low Countries. During the fifteenth century, under the impulse given by the Dukes of Burgundy, whose influence we have already mentioned, the most important chronicles, the best histories then extant, were magnificently transcribed in that beautiful Gothic minuscule, thick, massive and angular, which was called _lettre de forme_; and we find it again in some ancient editions of the end of the fifteenth century (Fig. 346), and of the beginning of the sixteenth.