Scriptorium in the context of "Pericopes of Henry II"

The Imperial Library of Constantinople, in the capital city of the Byzantine Empire, was the last of the great libraries of the ancient world. Long after the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria and the other ancient libraries, it preserved the knowledge of the ancient Greeks and Romans for almost 1,000 years. A series of unintentional fires over the years and wartime damage, including the raids of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, impacted the building and its contents. While there were many reports of texts surviving into the Ottoman era, no substantive portion of the library has ever been recovered. The library was founded by Constantius II (reigned 337–361 AD), who established a scriptorium so that the surviving works of Greek literature could be copied for preservation. The Emperor Valens in 372 employed four Greek and three Latin scribes. The majority of Greek classics known today are known through Byzantine copies originating from the Imperial Library of Constantinople.

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.

Federico da Montefeltro, also known as Federico III da Montefeltro KG (7 June 1422 – 10 September 1482), was one of the most successful mercenary captains (condottieri) of the Italian Renaissance. He became the lord of Urbino in 1444, and ruled the city as its duke from 1474 until his death. In addition to his considerable reputation for martial skill and honour, he was a renowned intellectual humanist and civic leader. Montefeltro commissioned the construction of a great library, perhaps the largest of Italy after the Vatican's, complete with a team of scribes in its scriptorium. He also assembled a large humanistic court in his Ducal Palace, designed by Luciano Laurana and Francesco di Giorgio Martini.

The Libro de los juegos (Spanish: "Book of games"), or Libro de axedrez, dados e tablas ("Book of chess, dice and tables", in Old Spanish), is a 13th century Spanish treatise of chess that synthesizes the information from Arabic works on this same topic, dice and tables (backgammon forebears) games, commissioned by Alfonso X of Castile, Galicia and León and completed in his scriptorium in Toledo in 1283. It contains the earliest European treatise on chess as well as being the oldest document on European tables games, and is an exemplary piece of the literary legacy of the Toledo School of Translators.

Visigothic script was a type of medieval script that originated in the Visigothic Kingdom in Hispania (the Iberian Peninsula). Its more limiting alternative designations littera toletana and littera mozarabica associate it with scriptoria specifically in Toledo and with Mozarabic culture more generally, respectively.

The script, which exists in book-hand and cursive versions, was used from approximately the late seventh century until the thirteenth century, mostly in Visigothic Iberia but also somewhat in the Catalan kingdom in current southern France. It was perfected in the 9th–11th centuries and declined afterwards. It developed from the late Roman cursive, uncial and half-uncial scripts, and shares many features of uncial, especially the form of the letter ⟨g⟩.

The Ada Gospels (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Codex 22) is a late eighth-century or early ninth-century Carolingian gospel book in the Stadtbibliothek, Trier, Germany. The manuscript contains a dedication to Charlemagne's sister Ada, from where it gets its name. The manuscript is written on vellum in Carolingian minuscule. It measures 14.5 by 9.625 inches (36.8 by 24.5 cm). The Ada Gospels are one of a group of manuscript illuminations by a circle of scriptoria that represent what modern scholars call the "Ada School". Other products of the Ada School include the Soissons Gospels, Harley Golden Gospels, Godescalc Evangelistary and the Lorsch Gospels; ten manuscripts in total are usually recognised.

The manuscript is illuminated. Its illuminations include an elaborate initial page for the Gospel of Matthew and portraits of Matthew, Mark and Luke. The illuminations show Insular, Italian and Byzantine influences. The Evangelist portraits show a firm grasp of Classical style typical of the Carolingian Renaissance.