Here is some text to be written in the lipsum manner. What do you make of it? We call “cursus” the types of rhythmic structures, based on the place of the tonic accent of the words, that characterised the ends of phrases in artistic Latin prose. This system was substituted in the Middle Ages for the classical one of metric clausulae based on the alternation of short and long syllables.
Three types of cursus were favoured by medieval theoreticians: cursus planus (“íllum dedúxit”), cursus tardus (“íre tentáverit”) and cursus velox (“hóminem recepístis”). Infrequent during the first millennium, the practice of the cursus was codified in the 11th c. by the masters of the school of Monte Cassino. From then on, it was systematically set to work first by the papal chancery, then by men of letters: in Dante, the three types mentioned above represent more than 98% of clausulae. The Italian humanists of the trecento progressively abandoned cursus, but its use was perpetuated in papal documents up to the beginning of the 16th century.