Humanist minuscule, or white letter, is a handwriting script or style of script that was invented in secular circles in Italy, at the beginning of the fifteenth century. The new hand was based on Carolingian minuscule, which Renaissance humanists took to be ancient Roman:
The humanistic term litterae antiquae (the "ancient letters") applied to this hand was an inheritance from the fourteenth century, where the phrase had been opposed to litterae modernae ("modern letters"), or blackletter.
Carolingian minuscule or Caroline minuscule is a script which developed as a calligraphic standard in the medieval European period as part of an overall effort to create a clear, uniform, and consistent manner by which to copy books. Multiple abbeys had begun to experiment with improvements to earlier Merovingian cursive scripts, with one version of an early Caroline script being developed at the scriptorium of the Benedictine monks of Corbie Abbey, about 150 kilometres (95 miles) north of Paris. The development and adoption of an improved minuscule script was slow and occurred across many locations throughout the Carolingian empire, although a later version of Caroline minuscule developed at the scriptoria of Tours and used in the creation of widely distributed bibles and Gospel books helped to contribute to an overall Caroline minuscule standard. Further adoption was encouraged by the issuance of imperial capitularies, with the script continuing to spread throughout the Holy Roman Empire and beyond, ultimately replacing Insular script in Britain and Ireland in the eleventh and twelfth centuries as well as Visigothic script in the Iberian peninsula.
Carolingian minuscule subsequently evolved in the tenth and eleventh centuries into a script which became known as blackletter or Gothic script, with the Carolingian minuscule becoming increasingly obsolete until the fourteenth century and the Italian Renaissance, when a script modeled on it and known as humanist minuscule script was developed. Through this later script the Carolingian minuscule can be seen as a direct ancestor of most modern-day Latin letter scripts and typefaces such as Times New Roman.
Schwabacher typefaces (pronounced [ˈʃvaːˌbaxɐ]) were a style of blackletter typefaces which evolved from Gothic Textualis (Textura) under the influence of Humanist type design in Italy during the 15th century. Schwabacher typesetting was the most common typeface in Germany, until it was replaced by Fraktur from the mid 16th century onwards. In the course of the 18th and 19th centuries (but in Germany not until 1941), Fraktur gave way in turn to Antiqua.