Poggio had been a very fine calligrapher of lettera antica and had transcribed texts to support himself—presumably, as Martin Davies points out— before he went to Rome in 1403 to begin his career in the papal curia. Berthold Ullman identifies the watershed moment in the development of the new humanistic hand as the youthful Poggio's transcription of Cicero's Epistles to Atticus. By the time the Medici library was catalogued in 1418, almost half the manuscripts were noted as in the lettera antica. The new script was embraced and developed by the Florentine humanists and educators Niccolò de' Niccoli and Coluccio Salutati. The papal chancery adopted the new fashion for some purposes, and thus contributed to its diffusion throughout Christendom. The printers played a still more significant part in establishing this form of writing by using it, from the year 1465, as the basis for their types. The humanistic minuscule soon gave rise to a sloping cursive hand, known as the Italian, which was also taken up by printers in search of novelty and thus became the italic type. In consequence, the Italian hand became widely used, and in the 16th century began to compete with the Gothic cursive. In the 17th century, writing masters were divided between the two schools, and there was in addition a whole series of compromises. The Gothic characters gradually disappeared, except a few that survived in Germany. The Italian became universally used, brought to perfection in more recent times by English calligraphers. See also Asemic writing Authorship analysis Bastarda Blackletter Book hand Calligraphy Chancery hand Codicology Court hand Cursive Fragmentology (manuscripts) Victor Gardthausen – palaeographer Glyph and Grapheme Graffiti Hand (writing style) Handwriting Historical Documents History of writing Isogloss Italic script Law hand List of New Testament papyri List of New Testament uncials Palaeographic letters Penmanship Philology Ronde script (calligraphy) Rotunda (script) Round hand Scribal abbreviation Secretary hand Textual scholarship References Further reading Western palaeography Bischoff, Bernhard, Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Cambridge University Press, 1989. (Translation by Dáibhí Ó Cróinín and David Ganz of: Paläographie des römischen Altertums und des abendländischen Mittelalters. (Grundlagen der Germanistik 24) Erich Schmidt Verlag 1986.) Lowe, E. A., Codices Latini Antiquiores: A Palaeographical Guide to Latin Manuscripts Prior to the Ninth Century, Clarendon Press, 1972. Parkes, M. B., English Cursive Bookhands, 1250–1500. (Oxford Palaeographical Handbooks.) Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. Revised edition London: Scolar Press, 1979, ISBN .