Books and their makers during the Middle Ages

by George Haven Putnam

PART II.

THE EARLIER PRINTED BOOKS.

PART II.

THE EARLIER PRINTED BOOKS.

CHAPTER I.

THE RENAISSANCE AS THE FORERUNNER OF THE PRINTING-PRESS.

THE fragments of classic literature which had survived the destruction of the Western Empire, had, as we have seen, owed their preservation chiefly to the Benedictine monasteries. Upon the monasteries also rested, for some centuries after the overthrow of the Gothic Kingdom of Italy, the chief responsibility for maintaining such slender thread of continuity of intellectual activity, and of interest in literature as remained. By the beginning of the twelfth century, this responsibility was shared with, if not entirely transferred to, the older of the great universities of Europe, such as Bologna and Paris, which from that time took upon themselves, as has been indicated, the task of directing and of furthering, in connection with their educational work, the increasing literary activities of the scholarly world.

With the increase throughout Europe of schools and universities, there had come a corresponding development in literary interests and in literary productiveness or reproductiveness. The universities became publishing centres, and through the multiplication and exchange of manuscripts, the scholars of Europe began to come into closer relations with each other, and to constitute a kind of international scholarly community. The development of such world-wide relations between scholars was, of course, very much furthered by the fact that Latin was universally accepted as the language not only of scholarship but practically of all literature.