Books and their makers during the Middle Ages

by George Haven Putnam

The German biographer of Cassiodorus, Franz, uses similar language:

Das Verdienst, zuerst die Pflege der Wissenschaften in den Bereich der Aufgaben des Klosterlichen Lebens aufgenommen zu haben, kann man mit vollem Rechte für Cassiodorus in Anspruch nehmen.[16]

In the account given by Cassiodorus of the scriptorium of his monastery, he describes, with an enthusiasm which ought to have been contagious, the noble work done there by the antiquarius[17]: “He may fill his mind with the Scriptures while copying the sayings of the Lord; with his fingers he gives life to men and arms against the wiles of the devil. As the antiquarius copies the words of Christ, so many wounds does he inflict upon Satan. What he writes in his cell will be scattered far and wide over distant provinces. Man multiplies the words of Heaven, and, if I may dare so to speak, the three fingers of his right hand are made to express the utterances of the Holy Trinity. The fast travelling reed writes down the holy words and thus avenges the malice of the Wicked One, who caused a reed to be used to smite the head of the Saviour.” The passage here quoted refers only to the work of the copyists of the Christian Scriptures. There are other references, however, in the same work to indicate that the activity of the scriptorium was not confined to these, but was also employed on secular literature.[18]

The devotion and application of the monks produced in the course of years a class of scribes whose work in the transcribing and illuminating of manuscripts far surpassed in perfection and beauty the productions of the copyists of classic Rome. In the monasteries north of the Alps the work of the scribes was, for the earlier centuries, devoted principally to the production of copies of missals and other books of devotion and of portions of the Scriptures. In Italy, however, where classical culture never entirely disappeared, attention continued to be given to the transcription of the Latin texts of which any manuscripts had been preserved, and it was these transcripts of the monks of Cassiodorus and S. Benedict that gave the “copy” for the first editions of Cicero, Virgil, and the other classic writers, produced by the earliest printers of Germany and Italy.

Cassiodorus took pains to emphasise the importance of binding the sacred codices in covers worthy of the beauty of their contents, following the example of the householder in the parable, who provided wedding garments for all who came to the supper of his son. One pattern volume had been prepared containing samples of various sorts of covers, from which the scribe might choose that which pleased him best. The abbot had also provided, to help the nightly toil of the scriptorium, mechanical lamps of some ingenious construction which appears to have made them self-trimming and to have insured a continuously sufficient supply of oil. The labour of the scribes was regulated on bright days by sun-dials, and on cloudy days and during the hours of the night by water-clocks.

In order to set an example of literary diligence to his monks, and to be able to sympathise with the difficulties of scribe work, Cassiodorus himself transcribed (probably from the translation of Jerome) the Psalter, the Prophets, and the Epistles. In addition to his labours as a transcriber, Cassiodorus did a large amount of work as an original author and as a compiler. According to the judgment of Migne, Franz, and Hodgkin, the importance of his original writings varied very considerably, and is by no means to be estimated in proportion to their bulk. One of the most considerable of these was his great commentary on the Psalms, in the text of which he was able to discover refutations of all the heresies that had thus far racked the Church, together with the rudiments of all the sciences which had become known to the world. This was followed by a commentary on the Epistles and by a history of the Church, the latter having been undertaken in co-operation with his friend Epiphanius. This history, known as the Historia Tripartita, is said to have had a larger circulation than any other of the author’s works. A fourth work, which gives more of the personality of the writer, was an educational treatise entitled, Institutiones Divinarum et Humanarum Lectionum. In the first part of this treatise, which bore the title of De Institutione Divinarum Litterarum, the author gives an account of the organisation of his scriptorium. In the second division of the treatise, entitled De Artibus ac Disciplinis Liberalium Litterarum, the author states his view of the relative importance of the four liberal arts, Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic, and Mathematics, the last named of which he divides into the four “disciplines” of Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy. Geometry and Astronomy occupy together one page, Arithmetic and Music each two pages, Grammar two pages, Rhetoric six pages, while to Logic are devoted eighteen pages. The final production of his industrious life was a treatise called De Orthographia, which was completed when its author was ninety-three years old, and which was planned expressly to further the work of the monastic scribes in collecting and correcting the codices of ancient books.

The death of Cassiodorus occurred in 575, in the ninety-sixth year of his age. An inheritor of the traditions of imperial Rome, Cassiodorus had been able, in a career extending over nearly a century, to be of signal service to his country under a series of foreign rulers. He had succeeded, through his personal influence with these rulers, in maintaining for Italy an organisation based on Roman precedents, and in preserving for the society of the capital an interest in the preservation and cultivation of classic literature. When the political institutions of Italy had been shattered and the very existence of civilisation was imperilled, he had transferred his services to the Church, recognising, with the adaptability which was the special characteristic of the man, that with the Church now rested the hopes of any continuity of organised society, of intellectual interest, of civilisation itself. He brought to the Church the advantage of exceptional executive ability and of long official experience, and he also brought a large measure of scholarship and an earnest zeal for literary and educational interests. It is not too much to say that the continuity of the thought and civilisation of the ancient world with that of the Middle Ages was due, more than to any other one man, to the life and labours of Cassiodorus.

S. Benedict.

—The Life of S. Benedict, written by Pope Gregory I. (who was born in 543, the year of the death of the saint), was for centuries one of the most popular books circulated in Europe. The full title is: Vita et Miracula Venerabilis Benedicti conditoris, vel Abbatis Monasterii; quod appellatur arcis Provinciæ Campaniæ. “The Life and Miracles of the Venerable Benedict, Founder and Abbot of the Monastery which is called (of) the Citadel of the Province of Campania.” This biography was, later, translated by Pope Zacharias from the original Latin into Greek.

The great achievement of Benedict was the one literary product of his life, the Regula. It comprises seventy-three short chapters, probably not designed by the author for use beyond the bounds of the communities under his own immediate supervision. It proved to be the thing for which the world of religious and thoughtful men was then longing, a complete code of monastic duty. By a strange parallelism, almost in the very year in which the great Emperor Justinian was codifying the results of seven centuries of Roman secular legislation for the benefit of the judges and the statesmen of the new Europe, Benedict, on his lonely mountain top, was composing his code for the regulation of the daily life of the great civilisers of Europe for seven centuries to come.