Happy Birthday Alcuin of York

       Yesterday, May 19th, marked the death date of one of my favourite historical figures, Alcuin of York. The English Medieval scholar was an educator who had a profound effect on the development of education and books during time of Charlemagne's Frankish Empire. From 782 to 790, he focused on transplanting a mixture of Celtic & Romano-British learning to mainland Europe. He founded the Carolingian palace library, for which he developed a small cursive script of characters called Carolingian Minuscule, which allowed more letter than ever before to be written on a single expensive page of parchment. Of great beauty, this script was later employed by the earliest printers. His hunger for learning revived the Augustinian tradition of Christian classical education and helped to lay the foundations of Europe's civilization of Christendom.