The palaeography of the first Slavic script - the Glagolitic script - is being published in
English language for the first time. Unlike former historiography-based palaeographic textbooks
this study is linguistically substantiated. After presenting the elemental historical and
philological knowledge on the creation of the script and its relation to the parallel Slavic
script - the Cyrillic - the author goes on to distinguish the development of those
linguistically-based segments (e.g. graphemes) from the means that optimize the transfer of
linguistic message through the visual writing system. The evolution of letter forms is being
observed in the long process of minusculization. The coordination of letters in lines and the
readjusting of their forms to the four line system turned out to be the 'spiritus movens' of
the changes not only in the letter forms but in the script's entire visual appearance as well.
At the focus of interest there are the oldest Macedonian Bulgarian Czech and Croatian
Glagolitic texts of the 10th and the 11th century.
