Books and their makers during the Middle Ages

by George Haven Putnam

The Influence of the Scriptorium.

—Hildebrand, who, under the name Gregory VII., became Pope in 1073, appears to have made large use of the literary facilities of the monasteries to bring effectively before the public the doctrinal teachings which seemed to him essential for the wholesome development of the strength of the Church in its great contest with the imperial power and for the proper rule of the world. The histories of the time speak of monks travelling throughout the Empire circulating writings in favour of the Church, by means of which writings schism could be withstood and the zeal of good Catholics aroused.[123]

Certain of the monasteries, in connection with their literary activity in behalf of the Pope, came into special disfavour with the Emperor. Among them was Hirschau, the importance of whose literary work has been previously referred to. This monastery fell under the displeasure of the Emperor Frederick IV., but the monks, says their own annalist, sustained by their prayers, braved the sword of the tyrant and despised the menaces of offended princes.[124] Abbot William of Hirschau had for twenty-two years been the soul of monastic regeneration in Germany. He was one of the great scholars of his time and had done not a little to further the literary pre-eminence of his monastery, and he became one of the most valiant defenders of the popes during this contest. Among other ecclesiastical writers whose pens were active in the defence of the papal decrees and in assailing the utterances of the schismatics, and whose work, by means of the distributing machinery which had already been organised between the monasteries, secured for the time a large circulation, were Bernard, at one time master of the schools of Constance, but later a monk at Hirschau; Bernold, a monk of St. Blaise; Adelbert, a monk of Constance; and Gebhard, another monk of Hirschau.[125]

Gregory was possibly the first pope who made effective and extended use of the writings of devout authors for the purpose of influencing public opinion. If we may judge by the results of his long series of contests with the imperial power in Germany, the selection of these literary weapons was one proof of his sagacity. In this contest, the scriptoria of the monasteries proved more powerful than the armies of the emperors; as, five hundred years later, the printing-presses of the Protestants proved more effective than the Bulls of the Papacy.

The most important, in connection with its influence and consequences, of the discoveries made by scholars concerning the fraudulent character of historic documents, occurred as late as the beginning of the fifteenth century. It was about 1440 when Laurentius Valla, at that time acting as secretary for King Alphonso of Naples, wrote his report upon the famous Donation of Constantine, the document upon which the Roman Church had for nearly a thousand years based its claims to be the direct representative in Western Europe of the old imperial authority. Valla brought down upon his head much ecclesiastical denunciation. The evidences produced by him of the fact that the document had been fabricated a century or more after the death of Constantine could not be gotten rid of, and, although for a number of years the Church continued to maintain the sacred character of the Donation, and has, in fact, never formally admitted that it was fraudulent, it was impossible, after the beginning of the sixteenth century, even for the ecclesiastics themselves to base any further claims for the authority of the Church upon this discredited parchment.

Of almost equal importance was the discovery of the fabrication of the pseudo Isidoric Decretals. The Decretals had been concocted early in the ninth century by certain priests in the West Frankish Church, and had been eagerly accepted by Pope Nicholas I., who retained in the archives of the Vatican the so-called originals. The conclusion that the Decretals had been fraudulently imposed upon the Church was not finally accepted until the beginning of the fourteenth century. It was with the humanistic movement of the Renaissance that historical criticism had its birth, and a very important portion of the work of such criticism consisted in the analysis of the lack of foundation of a large number of fabulous legends upon which many of the claims of the Church had been based.

There were evidently waves of literary interest and activity in the different monasteries, between which waves the art of writing fell more or less into disuse and the libraries were neglected. In the monastery at Murbach, for instance, in which, in the beginning of the century, important work had been done, it is recorded that in 1291 no monks were found who were able to write, and the same was said in 1297 of the more famous monastery of St. Gall.[126] On the other hand, the newly organised Orders of travelling or mendicant monks took an active interest in preparing and in distributing manuscript copies of works of doctrine at about the time when, in the older and richer Orders, literary earnestness was succumbing to laziness and luxury. With these mendicant monks, began also to come into circulation a larger proportion of original writings, transcribed and corrected, and probably to some extent sold by the authors themselves. Richard de Bury makes bitter references in his Philobiblon (chapters v. and vi.) to the general antagonism of the Church towards literature, but speaks with appreciation of the educational services rendered by the mendicant monks. Writing was done also by the monks of the Minorite Order, but their rules and their methods of life called for such close economy that the manuscripts left by them are distinguished by the meagreness and inadequacy of the material and the closely crowded script, which, in order further to save space, contains many abbreviations.

Roger Bacon is said to have come into perplexity because, when he wished to send his treatises to Pope Clement IV., he could find no one among the Brothers of his Order who was able to assist him in transcribing the same, while scribes outside of the Order to whom he attempted to entrust the work gave him untrustworthy and slovenly copies.[127]

With the beginning of the fourteenth century, it is possible to note a scholarly influence exercised upon certain of the monasteries by the universities. The most enterprising of the monks made opportunities for themselves to pass some years of their novitiate in one or more of the universities, or later secured leave of absence from the monasteries for the purpose of visiting the universities. It also happened that from the monasteries where literary work had already been successfully carried on, monks were occasionally called to the universities in order to further the literary undertakings of the theological faculties. Finally, the abbots, and other high officials of the monasteries, were, after the beginning of the fourteenth century, more frequently appointed from among the ecclesiastics who had had a university training.

The library in Heidelberg, the university of which dates from 1386, received from the monastery at Salem a large number of beautiful manuscripts, and finally, an illuminated breviary was completed in 1494 by the Cistercian Amandus, who, after the destruction of his monastery in Strasburg, had found refuge in Salem, where in 1529 he became abbot. There is evidence that, at this time, both in Salem and in other monasteries in which the business of manifolding and of selling or exchanging manuscripts became important, a large proportion of the work of illustrating or illuminating was done by paid artists.

After the reform movement which began with the Council of Basel, there came into existence, in connection with the renewal of theological discussions, a fresh literary activity in many of the monasteries. In the monastery at Camp, in 1440, the library was renewed and very much extended, and here were written by Guillaume de Reno, scriptor egregius nulli illo tempore in arte sua secundus, the Catholicon, books of the Mass, and other devotional works. Abbot Heinrich von Calcar provided Guillaume for eighteen years with a yearly supply of parchment, valued at seventeen florins, and of other writing material.

In Michelsberg, Abbot Ulrich III. (1475-1483) and his successor Andreas restored the long-time deserted library, and by work by the scribes of the monastery and through the exchange of works for the productions of other monasteries, secured an important collection of manuscripts. In 1492, Andreas, abbot of the monastery of Bergen, near Magdeburg, renewed the scriptorium, which, later, became active in the production of copies of works connected with this earlier reformation.

Adolph von Hoeck, who died in 1516, Prior of Scheda in Westphalia, was a skilled scribe as well as a zealous reformer. In Monsee, a certain Brother, Jacob of Breslau, who died in 1480, was said to have written so many volumes that six horses could with difficulty bear the burden of them.[128] In the monastery at Tegernsee, already referred to, there was, under Abbot Conrad V. (1461-1492), an active business in the manifolding and distribution of writings. The same was the case in Blaubeuern, where, as early as 1475, a printing-press was put into operation, but the preparation of manuscripts continued until the end of the century. Among the works issued from Blaubeuern in manuscript form after the beginning of printing, were the Chronicles of Monte Cassino, by Andreas Ysingrin, completed in 1477, and the Life of the Holy Wilhelm of Hirschau, by Brother Silvester, completed in 1492.[129]

This year of 1492 appears to have been one of exceptional intellectual as well as physical activity. It records not merely the completion of a number of important works marking the close of the manuscript period of literary production, but the publication, as will be noted in a later chapter, of a long series of the more important of the earlier printed books in Mayence, Basel, Venice, Milan, and Paris.

In Belgium, through the first half of the fifteenth century, while many of the monasteries had fallen into a condition of luxurious inactivity, work was still carried on in the Laurentium monastery of Liége by Johann of Stavelot, and by other zealous scribes, and in several other of the Benedictine monasteries of the Low Countries the scriptoria were kept busied. Towards the end of the fifteenth century, and for some years after the beginning of the work of the German printers, the production of manuscripts in Germany continued actively in the monastery of S. Peter at Erfurt, and in the monasteries of S. Ulrich and Afra in Augsburg, the work of which has been recorded with full precision and detail in the famous catalogue of Wilhelm Wittwer.

In 1472, in this latter monastery, Abbot Melchior founded the first printing-office at Augsburg in order to give to the monks continued employment, and in order also to be able to enlarge the library by producing copies of books for exchange. It was a long time, however, before the work of the printing-press came to be sufficiently understood to bring to a stop the labours of the scribes in manifolding manuscripts for sale and for exchange. The writings of the nun Helena of Hroswitha, the Chronicle of Urspergense, and other works continued to be prepared in manuscript form after printed editions were in the market. The same was the case with the great choir books, which continued during nearly half the century to be very largely prepared by hand in the scriptoria. This persistence of the old methods was partly due to habit and to the difficulty of communication with the centres in which the printing-presses were already at work, but was very largely, of course, the result of the fact that in the monasteries was always available a large amount of labour, and that the use of this labour for the preparation of sacred books had come to form part of the religious routine of the institution.

With the development of the system of common schools, the educational work which had previously been carried on in the convents was very largely given up, thus throwing upon the hands of the monks a still greater proportion of leisure time. In 1492, Johann of Trittenheim, Abbot of Sponheim, wrote to the Abbot Gerlach of Deutz a letter, De Laude Scriptorum, in which he earnestly invokes the scribes (he was addressing the scribes of the monasteries) by no means to permit themselves to be deterred from their holy occupation by the invasion of the printing-presses. Such admonitions might continue the work of the monks in certain of the scriptoria, but were, of course, futile in the attempt to preserve for any length of time the business of circulating manuscript copies in competition with the comparatively inexpensive, and often beautiful, productions of the printers.

An important part in the work of the preparation and distribution of manuscripts was taken by the so-called “Brothers of common life” (clerici de vita communi), who later, also occupied themselves with the new invention of printing. They cannot properly be classed with the scribes of the monasteries, for they made their work a trade and a means of revenue. This practice obtained, to be sure, also with certain of the monasteries, but it must be considered as exceptional with them. The Brothers differed also from the writers in the university towns and elsewhere, who prepared manuscripts for renting out to students and readers, partly because of the special conditions of their Brotherhood, under which the earnings of individual Brothers all went into a common treasury, but chiefly because they made their work as scribes a means of religious and moral instruction. The earnings secured from the sale of manuscripts were also largely devoted to the missionary work of the Brotherhood. The chief authority for the history of the Brotherhood is the work of Delprat, published in Amsterdam in 1856.

The Brotherhood house in Deventer, Holland, founded by Gerhard Groote in 1383, became an important workshop for the production and distribution of manuscripts. Delprat states that the receipts from these sales were for a time the main support of the Brotherhood house. In 1389, a copy of the Bible which had been written out by Brother Jan von Enkhuizen was sold for five hundred gulden in gold.[130] In Liége, the Brothers were known as Broeders van de Penne, because they carried quill pens in their caps. Groote seems himself to have taken a general supervision of this business of the production of books, selecting the books to be manifolded, verifying the transcripts, and arranging for the sale of the copies which were passed as approved. Florentius Radewijus had the general charge of the manuscripts (filling the rôle which to-day would be known as that of stock clerk) and of preparing the parchment for the scribes and writing in the inscriptions of the finished manuscripts. Later, with the development of the Order and the extension of its book business, each Brotherhood house had its librarius, or manager of the manufacturing and publishing department; its rubricator, who added the initial letters or illuminated letters in the more expensive manuscripts; its ligator, who had charge of the binding, etc.

It was a distinctive feature of the works prepared by the Brothers that they were very largely written in the language of the land instead of in Latin, which elsewhere was, as we have seen, the exclusive language for literature. It was, in fact, one of the charges made by the ecclesiastics against the Order that they put into common language doctrinal instruction which ordinary readers, without direct guidance of the Church, were not competent to understand, and which tended, therefore, to work mischief. In 1398, the Brothers took counsel on the point whether it were permissible to distribute among the people religious writings in Low German, and they appear to have secured the authorisation required. They laid great stress upon the precision of their script, and they were, as a rule, opposed to needless expenditure for ornamentation of text or of covers. Under the influence of Groote, the work of preparing manuscripts of good books was taken up by the monks and the nuns of Windesheim, but, according to Busch, the books produced in Windesheim were but rarely sold. In some cases these seem to have been distributed gratis, while in others they were given in exchange for other books required for the library of the monastery or convent.[131]

Wattenbach says that the Brothers in the Home at Hildesheim were called upon for an exceptional amount of labour in preparing books of the Mass and other devotional works in connection with the reform movement in the monasteries of lower Saxony, which was active in the middle of the fifteenth century. In the year 1450 (the year in which Gutenberg perfected his printing-press) it is recorded that the Hildesheim Brothers earned from the sale of their manuscripts no less than a thousand gulden.[132] In connection with their interest in the production and distribution of cheap literature, the Brothers did not fail to make very prompt and intelligent utilisation of the new invention of printing, and among the earlier printing-offices established in Germany and in the Low Countries were those organised by the Brothers at Deventer, Zwoll, Gouda, Bois-le-duc, Brussels, Louvain, Marienthal, Rostock, etc.