in calligraphy, any of several hands that developed in the British Isles after the Roman occupation of England and before the Norman Conquest. The foremost achievement of the combined Irish and English book artists, apart from their famous illumination, was the Insular half-uncial, based upon the standard uncial writing but admitting such cursive features as ascenders (b, d, f, h, l ), descenders ( f, g, p, q), and connections between letters. The Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells are its most famous landmarks. A second distinctive Insular script was the pointed minuscule that, by the 8th century, was beginning to attain the status of a book hand, as witness the Venerable Bede (Bede the Venerable, Saint) in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (“Ecclesiastical History of the English People”), written in about 731. Both Insular scripts were carried to the Continent by missionaries and used throughout Europe.