Books and their makers during the Middle Ages

by George Haven Putnam

CHAPTER I.

THE MAKING OF BOOKS IN THE MONASTERIES.

I HAVE used for the heading of the chapter the term “the making of books” rather than “literary work,” because the service rendered by the earlier monastic scribes (a service of essential importance for the intellectual life of the world) consisted chiefly, as has been indicated, not in the production of original literature, but in the reproduction and preservation of the literature that had been inherited from earlier writers,—writers whose works had been accepted as classics. While it was the case that in this literary labour it was the Benedictines who for centuries rendered the most important service, the first of the European monasteries in which such labour was carried on as a part of the prescribed routine or rule of the monastic life was that of Vivaria or Viviers, founded by Cassiodorus, which was never formally associated with the Benedictine Order, and which had, in fact, adopted, in place of the Benedictine Rule, a rule founded on the teachings of Cassian, who had died early in the fifth century. The work done, under the instructions of Cassiodorus, by the scribes of Viviers, served as an incentive and an example for Monte Cassino, the monastery founded by S. Benedict, while the scriptorium instituted in Monte Cassino was accepted as a model by the long series of later Benedictine monasteries which during the succeeding seven centuries became centres of literary activity.

After the destruction of the Gothic kingdom of Italy, it was with these monasteries that rested the intellectual future of Europe. Mankind was, for the time at least, to be directed and influenced, not so much by royal chancellors or prætorian guards, as by the monks preaching from their cells and by the monastic scribes distributing the world’s literature from the scriptorium.