Books and their makers during the Middle Ages

by George Haven Putnam

In 1400, a manuscript containing writings of Justinian, Sallust, and Suetonius, written on 115 folio sheets of parchment, was sold in Florence for 16 ducats, the equivalent of 100 marks. In 1467, a copy of the comedies of Terence, written on 198 folio sheets (paper, however, instead of parchment), was bought in Heidelberg for three gulden. By this date, sixteen years, namely, after the printing of Gutenberg’s first volume, the competition or the expectation of the competition of the printing-press, had already begun to affect the market prices of manuscripts. In 1499, there is record of the sale in Heidelberg for the price of two gulden, of a manuscript comprising 134 quarto sheets, containing the Hecuba of Euripides, and the Idyls of Theocritus.

In not a few of the monasteries, even of those which had an old-time repute for literary activity, the literary efforts came and went in waves, and sometimes for long periods, extending over a generation or more, there was an actual decrease in the extent of the attention given to the production of manuscripts and to the securing of additions to the library. In other instances the development of the libraries went on but slowly.

C. Schmidt refers to the record of the library of the Strasburg Cathedral, which in 1260 possessed a collection of fifty codices that had been for the most part presented by Bishop Wernher as far back as 1027. In the year 1372, the catalogue of the library shows that the number had increased to ninety-one, a gain of only forty-one manuscripts in a space of more than one century.

The renewed interest that came to the scholars of Italy in the works of classic writers with the revival of classical studies induced by the Renaissance caused manuscripts of these works to be searched for, not only in Italy and in the countries of the East that could most easily be reached by Italy, but throughout the monasteries of Europe. In 1517, there is record of instruction being given by Pope Leo X. to a certain cleric named Heytmer to visit the libraries of the Palatinate and of the adjoining districts and to search for classical manuscripts for purchase for the Papal collection. Heytmer was enjoined to make special inquiry for the missing books of Livy.

Another agent of Leo was fortunate enough to discover in the monastery of Corvey on the Weser the first five books of Tacitus. Being unable to induce the monastery to make sale of the manuscript, he succeeded in some way in appropriating it, and in getting it safely over the Alps. It was this manuscript that was used for the editio princeps of Tacitus, printed in Rome in 1515. The Pope sent to the library of the Corvey monastery a copy of this printed edition of the Tacitus as a restitution for the appropriated manuscript. The manuscript itself, in 1522, was taken (one does not know how) from Rome to Florence, where it is to-day chained in the Laurentian Library. I understand that this Corvey text constituted the only copy of the first five books of Tacitus which had been found when this author was first put into print.

The Manuscript Period in England.

—During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in England as in ancient Greece, and as also in mediæval Italy, Southern France and Germany, the people who were prepared to interest themselves in literary productions, received their literature, or at least their poetical literature, very largely by means of reciters or minstrels. In the prologue to his Troilus and Cressida, Chaucer tells us it was intended to be read or elles sung. George Ellis points out that this must relate to the chanting recitation of the minstrels. Ellis goes on to say: “A considerable part of our old poetry is simply addressed to an audience, without any mention of readers. That our English minstrels at any time united all the talents of the profession, and were at once poets and reciters and musicians, is extremely doubtful; but that they excited and directed the efforts of their contemporary poets to a particular species of composition, is as evident as that a body of actors must influence the exertions of theatrical writers. They were, at a time when reading and writing were rare accomplishments, the principal medium of communication between authors and the public; and their memory in some measure supplied the deficiency of manuscripts, and probably preserved much of our early literature until the invention of printing.”[397]

Says Jusserand: “At a time when books were rare, and when the theatre, properly so-called, did not exist, poetry and music travelled with the minstrels and gleemen (jongleurs) along the highway, and such guests were always welcome.”[398]

The connection of minstrelsy with the circulation of literature is referred to by Charles Knight as follows: “A popular literature was kept alive and preserved, however imperfectly, before the press came to make those who had learnt to read self-dependent in their intellectual gratifications; and what has come down to us of the old minstrelsy, with all its inaccuracy and occasional feebleness, shows us that the people of England, four or five centuries ago, had a common fund of high thought upon which a great literature might in time be reared. The very existence of a poet like Chaucer is the best proof of the vigour, and to a certain extent of the cultivation, of the national mind, even in an age when books were rarities.”[399]

As early as the twelfth century, during such reigns as those of Henry I. (Beauclerc) and Henry II., there was in England a very considerable production of literature, under such various headings as chronicles, satires, sermons, works of science and of medicine, treatises on style, prose romances, and epics in verse. Jusserand points out that a large proportion of these compositions were written in Latin.[400] This would indicate a wider general understanding of Latin than prevailed three centuries later when Caxton’s printing-press began its work; for, as will be noted in the chapter on Caxton, the proportion of Latin books issued by Caxton was very much smaller than was the case with the contemporary publishers in France and in Germany. Such an active and varied literary production as that described by Jusserand would also, of course, imply the existence of a considerable body of trained scribes in addition to those who were at work in the monastic scriptoria on the chronicles and books of devotion.