As long as writing is a living system, being written by many hands in the service of human flourishing, its shapes will evolve, just as the words and sounds of a spoken language do. And so it was that new Roman cursive itself finally generated the last script to emerge from the classical world. Initially it was used in legal settings and as a semi-formal book script. To make it appropriate for more formal use, a pen with a square-cut nib was employed, held fairly flat to the writing line so that the vertical elements of the script were favoured with weight and the horizontal elements were think. Though there is absolutely no structural or developmental relationship between those forms and uncials, these new letters were given the name half-uncials by the two French Benedictine monks who first classified them in the eighteenth century, and the name has stuck. Uncials, new Roman cursive and roman half-uncials were the scripts that survived in the provinces as the Roman Empire itself began to fall apart. ~ Page 38

. . . . It is surprising to discover the degree to control that is possible when one goes through some of Carstairs's exercise. But there is a curious sidelight on this approach as practised in the early nineteenth century, which originates with Lewis. For all the freedom that such penmanship appears to demonstrate, success in this kind of movement depends upon building a firm platform of stressed muscles and fixed limbs within the writer's body, from which movement can be organized. The free shoulder movement is only possible by making the trunk of the body rigid and the writing hand relatively immobile, even as the arm moves the hand and pen about the surface. To encourage this stability Lewis, Carstairs and Foster all advocated the use of binding (figure 48), elaborate ribbons and tied the hand in the correct position on to the pen; writers might also be tied to their chairs to ensure correct posture. None of this binding is actually necessary, but something about this use of restraint chimed with the times and it struggles to control the body and perhaps the power of writing itself. In the world of women's fashion the wrist was 'freed into its natural shape' with whalebone stays and laced corsets. Shirts and collars would soon be stiff and starched. And not so far into the future handwriting 'drill' would soon be executed to the beat of metronomes. The cultural historian Tamara Plakins Thornton has commented that writing is now conceptualized as 'the triumph of the student's will over his body.... All told pedagogy promised a good deal more than training in a particular skill. Its real product was not handwriting but men, men of a type compatible with a new social order." ~ Page 217