Bastarda or bastard, also known as Hybrid, Hybrida, or Mongrel Hand, is a term applied to a variety of scripts and typefaces originating in western Europe during the Renaissance. They were often used as Business or Court Hands.
One form of bastarda is "bastard Gothic": the blackletter manuscript hands used in various parts of continental Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries, mainly to write vernacular narratives. Similar English scripts are sometimes distinguished as "bastarda Anglicana" or simply "Anglicana".
Spanish bastarda, by contrast, was a modified form of Italic script which remained in use there until as late as the 1830s. The paleographer A. S. Osley characterized this bastarda as the "true successor" of the Italic hand, which had been supplanted by an early form of copperplate script outside Spain.
Early printers produced a variety of typefaces based on local bastarda blackletter.
Over time, most of Europe's printers standardized on Antiqua (or "roman") typefaces, and bastarda type fell out of use in most countries. Despite this trend, the German variety developed into the national ' type, which remained in use until the mid-twentieth century.
British typeface designer Jonathan Barnbrook has designed a contemporary interpretation of these early typefaces titled Bastard.