I’ve been reading about the history of modern European Latin letterforms, working from the assumption that the modern alphabet is actually a combination in practice of Roman capitals, Carolingian miniscule, and italic cursives, corresponding to our present-day uppercase, lowercase, and italics.

I’ve found good sources on the history of Roman letterforms (e.g., Gray’s History of lettering) and on the history of italics (e.g., Morison’s Early italian writing books and Atkins’s Masters of the italic letter), but does anyone have recommendations for the precursors of the lower case Latin forms?