FOOTNOTES:
[2] De Re Diplomatica, Libri vi. in quibus quidquid ad veterum instrumentorum antiquitatem, materiam, scripturam et stilum; quidquid ad sigilla, monogrammata, subscriptiones ac notas chronologicas; quidquid inde ad antiquariam, historicam, forensemque disciplinam pertinet, explicatur et illustratur. Op. et Stud. Joh. Mabillon.—Fol. Paris, 1709.
[3] Italian Diary.
CHAPTER VIII.
INDICATIONS OF THE SURVIVANCE OF ANCIENT LITERATURE, THROUGH A PERIOD EXTENDING FROM THE DECLINE OF LEARNING IN THE SEVENTH CENTURY, TO ITS RESTORATION IN THE FIFTEENTH.
General epithets usually carry with them a meaning that oversteps the bounds of truth: we hear of “the dark ages”—“the period of intellectual night”—“the season of winter in the history of man”—and we are apt to imagine that during the times thus designated the human mind had become utterly palsied, and that all learning was extinct. But in fact throughout that period, reason, though often misdirected, was not sleeping: philosophy was rather bewildered than inert; and learning, although immured, was not lost.
In no part of the period that extends from the reign of Justinian, when Greek and Roman literature everywhere lay open to the light of day, till the fall of the Constantinopolitan empire, and the revival of western learning in the fifteenth century, do we lose the traces even of the classic authors, much less of those that belong to sacred literature; for in each of the intervening ages, and in every quarter of Europe, there were writers whose works, being still extant, give evidence of their acquaintance with most of the principal authors of more remote times.
Under the vague impression that has been created by certain loose modes of speaking, relative to the deep and universal ignorance said to have prevailed throughout Europe during a space of seven hundred years, the existence of a large number of manuscripts of the classic authors, undoubtedly executed during those very ages of ignorance, presents a great apparent difficulty: for, from what motive, it may be asked, or for whose use, were these works transcribed, so frequently as that they were found in all parts of Europe, on the revival of earning in the fifteenth century? The facts that are now to be mentioned, will furnish a sufficient solution of this question, by proving that, in the West and in the East, during those times of general intellectual lethargy, there were more than a few individuals who cultivated polite literature with ardour, and to whom the possession and preservation of books was a matter of the liveliest interest. The names about to be mentioned—as the well-informed reader will recollect—bear but a small proportion to the whole number that might be adduced: it is sufficient for our purpose to refer to one or two writers in each century.
But before naming individual men, whose extant writings give evidence of the continuity of literature, and therefore assure us of the safe transmission of ancient books to modern times, it will be serviceable to bring clearly into view what it is which is needed for constituting the Living Medium of this transmission. Now, for bringing this matter home to the convictions and the consciousness of the reader, let him take up his own family history, and pursue it, retrogressively, inquiring how many individuals are needed—or let us rather say how few—to make up a chain of historical and literary conveyance, through any given track of time past; for instance, from this present time, 1858, into the mid-time of the Elizabethan era, as thus:—
I will now assume the fact—whether it be true or not does not signify to the argument—that my progenitors in a direct line were educated persons—or if not so—that each father in the line secured for his son an ordinary grammar-school education—instruction just sufficient for making him cognisant of the most noted persons and authors of preceding times; so that, in each case, if the father himself did not teach the son, the father’s friend and townsman, the schoolmaster, did it, as for instance:—From my father’s own lips I received the rudiments of general history, and of literary history, so that in my boyhood I came to be familiar with all the principal names of public men and authors, up from that time to times indefinitely remote. This process of paternal instruction carries me up to the last decade of the eighteenth century: say, to the time of the breaking out of the French Revolution. But then, my father had received, either from his father, or from his father’s proxy, the schoolmaster, a like kind and amount of general information, by means of which we are carried up, without a break, to the times of Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Sir Joshua Reynolds; and in fact my father distinctly remembers, when a boy, seeing, and being in company with, some of these illustrious men, the friends of my grandfather. Then he had received—we will suppose—a similar initiation in literary and political history, and if so, then we are furnished with stepping-stones up to the times of Bentley, Pope, Swift, Addison, Watts, and although this last name would seem to stand beyond the limit of any immediate recollections, yet it is a fact that the “Divine Songs” have come to me by means of a single intervening person—from one who, as a favoured little girl, learned them, standing at the amiable doctor’s knee. Thus it is that we travel safely, and with a distinct cognisance of the way, through more than a century of literary conveyance. At this rate, and if we may take this last preceding period of time as our gauge of centuries past, then we shall require the aid of only eight or nine persons, in series, to bring us into correspondence with Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Fewer than this—we might take six long-lived men to put us into this position of proximity with the worthies of the Elizabethan era.
In making good our supposition, it is not necessary to assume the fact (which we can seldom certainly know) that there has been, in any one family, a continuous succession of fathers and sons—the father living long enough to instruct the son. We should rather take the case of the intellectual filiation of college life: we imagine the learned professor, during the last ten years of his official life, imparting his mental substance to a hundred or two of scholars, some two or three of whom, at least, will live to do the like, from the same chair, in behalf of their successors. On this ground the individual teachers need not be more than twelve, upon whose oral testimony, in succession, we rely in passing from an age of generally diffused intelligence, to the times of the revival of learning, and of printed books.
It will be remembered that—if indeed there were grounds of doubt concerning the safe transmission of ancient books to modern times, any such suspicions can attach only to the period that is usually designated as the “Dark Ages,” and these need not be reckoned as more than seven, reaching back from the times of Dante, Petrarch, Chaucer, Wickliffe, to the pontificate of Gregory the Great, in whose times, as appears from his writings, the learning of the preceding ages was still familiarly known to more than a few.
The Sixth Century of the Christian era abounds with the names of writers in all departments of literature, many of whose works, having descended to modern times, present ample evidence of the scarcely diminished diffusion of general learning. Among many others, such were—Procopius, the historian of the reign of Justinian—and Agathias, who continued that history, and was a learned man;—Boethius, author of what is regarded as the last specimen of pure Latinity—a poem on “the Consolations of Philosophy;”—Hesychius, the lexicographer—Proclus, a platonic philosopher;—Fulgentius, and Cassiodorus, ecclesiastical writers;—Priscianus, a grammarian;—Gildas the wise, an Anglo-Saxon historian;—Evagrius Scholasticus, an ecclesiastical historian;—Simplicius, the commentator upon Aristotle and Epictetus;—Marcellinus Ammianus, an historian and critic, whose works contain copious references to ancient literature; and Stephen, of Byzantium, a grammarian and geographer. We might take in hand the work of this last-named writer—ΠΕΡΙ ΠΟΛΕΩΝ, as furnishing, by itself, a sufficient mass of evidence in proof of the extensive book-learning of those times which immediately overlook the gulf—the dark ages. This Stephen, the geographer, in the course of his account of the cities and towns of the ancient world, cites, or makes some reference to, the works of more than three hundred authors, to which he had access at any moment, while compiling his own.
The Seventh Century produced fewer writers than perhaps any other period that can be named within the compass of literary history. Yet there are more than enough to serve our present purpose: such are—Theophylact of Simocatta, who has left a history of the reign of the emperor Maurice, not very highly esteemed indeed, but abounding in allusions to the literature of the times.
Isidore, bishop of Seville, a complete collection of whose works fills seven quarto volumes, is a writer very proper to be mentioned in relation to our present purpose. Confessedly the age of Mahomet was a dull time: few indeed are the writers whose mere names have come down to us;—and yet, even in such a time, a voluminous writer, who treats of all kinds of subjects—religion, Church history, grammar, poetry, astronomy, physical science, and treats some of these systematically, might not only employ himself in labours of this kind, but also find among his contemporaries, and the men of the next age, numerous readers, and admirers, and copyists too, who found their account in transcribing so vast a product of literary industry. The times of this bishop, therefore, dark as they might be, were nevertheless times of book-knowledge: throughout the dim period there was a class of the learned, numerous and intelligent enough, to keep watch upon the intellectual treasures of brighter times, to conserve the rich inheritance of mind, and to do their office in transmitting it down, unimpaired, to after ages. This fact is all which just now we need think of.
What we have thus said of the seventh century—of its darkness and its light, might be affirmed with little difference, as to the next. Our countryman, the “Venerable Bede,” flourished in the seventh, but lived far on into the eighth century. The writings of Bede—and we should remember that he passed his life in the seclusion of a remote monastery—St. Peter and St. Paul, on the Tyne, in the diocese of Durham—afford ample proof of a wide diffusion of books, in that age. Bede displays extensive, if not profound learning, the whole of which he had acquired from sources that were ordinarily within the reach of monastic students. Bede “was a man of universal learning, not less skilled in the Greek than in the Latin tongue: a poet, a rhetorician, an historian, an astronomer, an arithmetician, a master of chronology and geography, a philosopher, and theologian. So much was he admired in his own times that it became a proverbial saying among the learned—“A man born in the farthest corner of the earth has compassed the earth with the line of his genius.” “He was,” says Bale, “versed in the profane authors beyond any man of that age. Physics and general learning he derived, not from turbid streams, but from the pure fountains; that is, from the chief Greek and Latin authors. Indeed, there is hardly anything of value in the compass of ancient literature, that is not to be met with in Bede, although he never travelled beyond the limits of his native land.”
The conservative function was taken up by several of Bede’s disciples; among them we may name Alcuin, who did much, by his learning and his influence at the court of Charlemagne, to aid the endeavours of that enlightened prince for the restoration of literature. He was skilled in the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew languages; gave lectures in all the sciences, and founded many public schools. His works, historical and theological, are in part extant, and they justify the reputation he enjoyed. In his letters he familiarly quotes the classic writers.
Charlemagne, himself tolerably well acquainted with Latin and Greek authors, zealously laboured to restore learning in the Church, and out of it. He invited learned men to his court, employed them in making Latin translations of the Greek classics and of the fathers, founded public schools, and introduced regulations tending to make some degree of education indispensable to all who held office in the Church. Of the professors invited by Charlemagne to his court, as many came from the British Isles as from Italy. We must not forget, says Muratori, the praise of Britain, Scotland, and Ireland, which, in the study of the liberal arts, surpassed all other nations of the West in those times; nor omit to record the diligence of the monks of those countries, who roused and maintained the glory of letters which everywhere else was languishing or fallen.
Raban Maurus, a disciple of Alcuin, created archbishop of Mentz, in 847, had, before his elevation, taught theology, philosophy, poetry, and rhetoric at Paris, in the school established there by the Anglo-Saxon monks. “A man well versed in the Holy Scriptures, and thoroughly learned in profane literature, as his writings abundantly testify.” He enriched the monastery of Fulda, on the Rhine, where he received his early education, with a large collection of books; and there he founded a school. Two hundred and seventy monks belonged to the establishment, who were trained by him in every branch of learning. Disciples flocked to him from all countries, and he reared for the Church a great number of ministers well furnished for its service. He died, 856.
One of the first professors in the University of Oxford founded (or restored) by King Alfred, was John Scot; he afterwards went into France, where he was honourably entertained at the court of Charles the Bald, at whose request he translated some Greek authors into Latin: but these versions, in which a literal adherence to the original was observed, were scarcely intelligible to those for whose use they were intended. His writings display, however, much various learning; they were condemned as heretical by the Church on account of his opinions relative to the Eucharist. Being driven from France by the order of the pope, he took refuge in an English monastery; but there, at the instigation of the monks, he, it is said, like Cassianus, was killed by his scholars, with their iron styles.
Before the Danish incursions, the English monasteries and churches abounded with men of learning; but these establishments being broken up and the monks dispersed by the rude invaders, literature and the arts became almost extinct in the country. Alfred, himself a man of learning, and a various writer, effected, as is known, much towards their restoration, by the re-establishment of the ruined monasteries—the erection of many new ones—the endowment of schools—the foundation of lectureships at Oxford, and by the diffusion of his own writings, which, even if he had not been a king, would have perpetuated his name.
Contemporary with the last-named writer was Photius, with whom no author of that, or of several succeeding ages, can be compared: his works hold up a mirror of the literature that was extant in his times. Photius, educated for secular employments, and for some time engaged in the service of Michael III., was by that emperor forcibly invested with the dignity of patriarch of Constantinople (858) in the room of Ignatius. That he might pass regularly to this elevation, he was made monk, reader, sub-deacon, deacon, priest, and patriarch, in the course of six days. From the office thus violently assumed, he was, with little ceremony, expelled by Basilius, the successor of Michael. Once again, at the head of a band of soldiers, he possessed himself of the patriarchate, of which, by similar means, he was at length finally deprived; after which he retired to a monastery, where he ended his days. Before his elevation, he had composed the most useful and the most celebrated of his works, the Myriobiblon, which contains, in the form of criticisms, analyses, and extracts, an account of upwards of 270 works. This treasury of learning preserves many valuable fragments from authors whose works have perished, and affords important aid in ascertaining the genuineness of many of the remains of ancient literature.
Eutychius, an Egyptian physician, and afterwards (933) patriarch of Alexandria, wrote a universal history, which is still extant, and which, though it contains numerous fables, exhibits the various learning of the author, and of his times. Though so large a number of existing manuscripts as appear to have been executed in the tenth century, prove that a great degree of activity in the reproduction of books prevailed in that age, it presents the names of few authors whose works have descended to modern times.
The Eleventh Century is much richer in distinguished names, of which it may suffice to mention these:—
Avicenna, an Arabian physician and Mahometan doctor, reduced the science of medicine to a systematic form, including almost everything that had been written on the subject by his predecessors: he was versed in Greek literature, and is said to have committed Aristotle’s Metaphysics to memory. The first conquests of the Saracens in Asia, Africa, and Spain, during the seventh and eighth centuries, were almost fatal to the interests of learning. But no sooner had they well established their power in the conquered countries, than the Caliphs sought to rekindle the light of knowledge. During two or three centuries, Bagdat in the East, and Cordova in the West, were the seats, not only of splendid monarchies, but of science, general learning, and great refinement. It was, however, chiefly the mathematical and physical sciences that were cultivated by the Arabians. They possessed imperfect and corrupted translations of several of the Greek authors, especially of Aristotle, Theophrastus, Euclid, and Dioscorides; and they had some general, though imperfect, acquaintance with the Greek historians. Some of the Latin translations, made by the order of Charlemagne, were derived from these Arabian versions.
Michael Psellus, a Greek physician, and a monk, wrote upon subjects of all kinds: “There was no science which he did not either illustrate by his comments, or abridge, or reduce to a better method.—A man celebrated for the extent of his acquirements in divine and human learning, as his many works, both printed and in manuscript, evince.”
Lanfranc, by birth an Italian, was created archbishop of Canterbury by William of Normandy; he promoted learning among the clergy, and was himself reputed to be universally accomplished in the literature extant in that age.
Anselm, the disciple and successor of Lanfranc, in the see of Canterbury, was also in repute for general learning.
The works of Suidas, a Byzantine monk, like those of Photius, contain a vast store of various learning, singularly useful on points of criticism and literary history. The lexicon of this writer, besides the definition of words, contains accounts of ancient authors of all classes, and many quotations from works that have since perished.
Sigebert, a monk of Brabant, has left a chronicle of events from A. D. 381 to his own times, 1112, and a work containing the lives of illustrious men.
The name of Anna Comnena, daughter of the emperor Alexius Comnenus, and wife of Nicephorus Bryennius, distinguishes the early part of the twelfth century. She wrote an elegant and eloquent history of her father’s reign. This work displays not only a masculine understanding, but an extensive acquaintance with literature and the sciences.
England produced during this century several eminent writers, who were accomplished in the learning of the age. Such were William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntington, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and Joseph of Exeter—author of two Latin poems, on the Trojan war, and the war of Antioch, or the Crusade—and, somewhat later, Stephen Langton, archbishop of Canterbury, reckoned the most learned man of western Europe in those times.
Eustathius, archbishop of Thessalonica, flourished towards the close of the twelfth century. His commentaries on Homer, besides serving to elucidate the Greek language by many important criticisms, drawn from sources that have since been lost, contain, like the works of Photius and Suidas, innumerable references to the Greek classics, and thus furnish the means of ascertaining the integrity and the genuineness of the text of those authors, as they are now extant.
The brothers John and Isaac Tzetzes, critics and grammarians of Constantinople, are still consulted as commentators upon some of the Greek authors. John Tzetzes is a voluminous writer: his extant works give evidence at once of his vast acquaintance with literature, and of the literary facilities of that age, at least in cities such as Constantinople.
Robert Grostest (Greathead), bishop of Lincoln, was famed for his skill in the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew languages, as well as for the bold resistance he made to the exactions of the popes upon the English church. Camden says of him that “he was a man versed in the languages and in general literature in a degree scarcely credible, when the age in which he lived is considered; a terrible reprover of the pope, the adviser of his king (Henry III.), and a lover of truth.”
Matthew Paris, one of the earliest of the English historians, displays in his works an acquaintance with ancient literature, as well as a familiar knowledge of the antiquities of his native country. Like the bishop last named, Paris vigorously opposed the papal usurpations in England; nor did he less courageously reprove vice in every rank at home. His reputation as a man of learning and virtue enabled him to effect a considerable reformation in many of the English monasteries. He died 1259. The “Historia Major” of this writer begins with the Norman Conquest, and is continued to the year of the author’s death, 1259.
The works of Albert, called the Great, a Dominican friar, and afterwards, in 1260, bishop of Ratisbon, fill one-and-twenty volumes. They are chiefly on the physical sciences, but include a sort of encyclopædia of the learning of the age. “A man of wonderful erudition, to whom few things in theological science, and hardly any in secular learning, were unknown. On account of the extent and variety of his acquirements surnamed ‘the Great’—an honour conferred upon no other learned man during life.” Albert, like Roger Bacon, incurred among his contemporaries the suspicion of being a magician. Learning, in the restricted sense of the term, or the knowledge of books, though possessed by a comparatively small class of persons, was too frequent to excite wonder or envy; but Science, or a knowledge of nature, and this acquired, not from Aristotle, but from experiment, was so rare, that it seldom failed to engender both, and to occasion a dangerous accusation of correspondence with infernal spirits.
The revival of learning is usually reckoned to have commenced in the fifteenth century: but in the fourteenth a very decided advancement in almost every department of literature had taken place. That the ignorance which had prevailed in the preceding century was wearing away from the bulk of the community in several parts of Europe, and that the educated classes were acquiring a better taste and more expanded views, needs no other evidence than that which is so abundantly presented in the works of Dante, of Petrarch, of Boccatio, of Chaucer, and of Gower, which were not merely produced in that period, but were extensively read and admired.
Fewer instances than those given above might suffice to prove, that at no part of that tract of time, which extends from the decline of learning in the sixth century, to its revival in the fifteenth, was there anything which can be called an extinction of the knowledge of ancient literature. This proof, it must be acknowledged, is much more complete in reference to the Greek, than to the Latin authors; it is also more ample in relation to ecclesiastical and sacred, than to profane literature. Of all the extant manuscripts, executed in the middle ages, perhaps nineteen in twenty belong to the former class. The continuance of the eastern empire till the middle of the fifteenth century, afforded an uninterrupted protection to Greek learning during those periods in which western Europe was laid waste by the Gothic nations. Yet even those devastations were never universal either in their extent, or in their kind. At times when Italy was in ashes, the British Islands were secure. And if cities were sacked and burned, and if castles, palaces, and cathedrals were pillaged and overthrown, hundreds of religious houses, in strong or secluded situations, remained untouched; or if occasionally they were subjected to the violence of armies, or to the exactions of conquerors, they more often lost their chests, their cups and their salvers, than their books.
Learning and the sciences can flourish and advance only where there are the means of a wide and quick diffusion of the fruits of intellectual labour: but they may exist even under the almost total absence of such means. This was the case in Europe during the middle ages. Knowledge rested with the few whom the inward fire of native genius constrained to pursue it: and these few were often insulated from each other, and unknown beyond the walls within which they spent their lives; and often secluded also by their tastes, even from their fellows of the same society.
In every myriad of the human race, take the number where or when we may, there will be found a few individuals—born for thought; and if the vocation of nature is not always stronger than every obstacle, it is, for the most part, strong enough to overcome such as are of ordinary magnitude. Those who are thus endowed with the appetite for knowledge, will certainly follow the impulse, if the means of its acquirement are presented to them in early life. Now these means were everywhere interspersed among the nations of Europe during the middle ages, by the monastic system; and it may be questioned whether there were not then greater chances for drawing within the pale of learning the native mind of every district, than are afforded even by the present constitutions of society. The religious houses were so thickly scattered through every country, and the continual draught from the population for the maintenance of the numbers of their inmates (a standing rule of the monastic establishments enjoined that the original number of each congregation should be maintained) was so great, that they must have taken up many more than the gifted individuals of every neighbourhood; and yet such individuals would almost certainly be included within that enlistment; for whenever a youth displayed a fondness for learning, nothing better could be done for him, whether he was the son of a peasant or a noble, than to devote him to the service of the Church. The monasteries usually contained schools for the youth of their vicinities. From these schools the superiors of the house had the opportunity of selecting any who gave promise of intelligence.
In the very darkest times, learning insured to its possessor a degree of reputation; and the heads of religious houses, in most instances, sought to decorate their establishments with some particles of the honours of erudition, as well as to recommend them by the possession of relics; and many were eagerly ambitious to enhance the literary celebrity of their communities. With this view it would be their policy to afford the necessary means and encouragement to those who seemed most likely to support the credit of the society. “The education of a monk, at least in the fourteenth century, consisted of church music and the primary sciences, grammar, logic, and philosophy—obviously that of Aristotle. Some French and Latin must also have been included; for these were the languages the monks were enjoined to speak on public occasions. They were afterwards sent to Oxford or Paris to learn theology. Such indeed was the encouragement held out to literature, that in a provincial chapter of abbots and priors of the Benedictine order, held at Northampton A.D. 1343, men of letters and masters of art were invited to become monks, by a promise of exemption from all daily services.”—Fosbrooke.
Independently therefore of any more direct evidence, there would be reason to believe that many if not most of the monasteries and conventual churches, at all times, included an individual or two whose tastes led him to devote his life to study, and who would become the sedulous guardian and conservator of the books of the house, directing the labours of his less intelligent brethren in the work of transcribing such as might be falling into decay.
In the estimation of minds ruled by the love of books, even if incapable of discriminating the precious from the worthless—the worthless, by a principle of association, partakes, to a large degree, of the respect that belongs in reason only to what is intrinsically valuable. A BOOK, whatever be its subject or its merits, is viewed with a fond covetousness by those whose passion it is to love books. This feeling must have been strong indeed in times when books were hardly to be purchased, and when their ideal value included a recollection of the toil of transcription. The spirit of the ruling superstition, which taught the attachment of an incalculable importance to objects intrinsically worthless, must also have favoured an undistinguishing reverence for books. We need not then be surprised to find that works of all classes, though altogether unsuited to the taste of the times, were reproduced, from age to age, by the monkish copyists.
While, therefore, all taste for instruction had disappeared from the face of society—while kings and nobles were often as ignorant as artisans and peasants, while even many of the clergy retained only some shreds of learning, the productions of brighter ages were still hoarded and perpetuated, and were made accessible to the few whose intellectual ardour carried them beyond the standard of their times.
The reader who would extend his acquaintance with the subjects so briefly referred to in this chapter will find the means of doing so amply supplied in the work of Mr. Maitland which so conclusively establishes the fact of the uninterrupted continuance of the intellectual life of Europe through those ages which too hastily have been spoken of by modern writers as times of universal ignorance.[4]