Between an academic library and a monastic collection there were differences of character and in the beauty and value of the manuscripts. As a general rule a large proportion of the monks’ books were more or less richly ornamented: they were the treasures as well as the tools of the community. The books of the colleges were usually for practical purposes: they were tools, treasured, doubtless, for their contents, not for the beauty of the writing or because they were decorated. The difference in character of the collections as a whole was one of proportion in the
representation of the various classes of books. Generally speaking, the monastic collection comprised proportionately more theology and less canon and civil law than the academic library. In the subjects of the trivium and the quadrivium, and in philosophy, a college was more strongly equipped than a monastery; on the other hand, a monastery frequently had a larger proportion of classical literature, and always more “light” or romance literature.
Early university studies were in two parts, the trivium—grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and the quadrivium—music, astronomy, geometry, and arithmetic. These were the seven liberal arts. A fresco in a chapel in the Church of S. Maria Novella at Florence illustrates these arts. On the right of the cartoon is the figure of grammar; beneath is Priscian. For the study of this subject John Garland recommended Priscian and Donatus. Priscian was a leading text-book on the subject, and it was supported by a short manual compiled from Donatus. At Oxford extracts from these authors were thrown into the form of logical quaestiones to afford subjects of argument at the disputations held once a week before the masters of grammar.[542] To these books should be added a dictionary, with some peculiar and quaint etymologies, by Papias the Lombard; grammatical works by John Garland; Bishop Hugutio’s etymological dictionary (c. 1192); a dreary hexameter poem by Alexander Gallus, the Breton Friar (d. 1240)—“the olde Doctrinall, with his diffuse and unperfite brevitie”; Eberhard’s similar poem (c. 1212), called Graecismus, because it includes a chapter on derivations from the Greek; and a very large book, the Catholicon (c. 1286), partly a grammar and partly a dictionary, with copious quotations from Latin classics, which had been compiled with some skill and care by John Balbi, a Genoese Black Friar. Papias and Hugutio were sharply condemned by Friar Bacon, but they remained in use long after his time, and Balbi owed much to both of them. Many copies of the Catholicon seem to have been made, although the transcription of so large a book was costly: even before it was printed (1460), copies for reference were sometimes chained up in English churches, and after it was printed this practice became more general, at any rate in France. By the fourteenth century Priscian was almost superseded by Alexander and Eberhard, whose versified grammars came into common use; a jingle, whether it be—
“ ‘Ne facias’ dicas ‘oroque ne facias.’
Humane, dure, large, firmeque, benigne,
Ignaveque, probe, vel avare sive severe,
Inde nove, plene, vel abunde sive proterve,
Dicis in er vel in e, quamvis sint illa secundae,”
in the fourteenth century, or