Books and their makers during the Middle Ages

by George Haven Putnam

According to Wattenbach, the use of papyrus for the documents of the Church, and even for the Papal Bulls, extended as late as the tenth century. Sickel speaks of a Bull of Benedict VIII., of 1022, as the latest known to him which is written on papyrus.

The term chartularii, or cartularii, was applied to clerics originally trained for the work of the Church, but who occasionally devoted themselves also to the manifolding of books. In the memoir of Arnest, who was the first Archbishop of Prague, it was related that he always kept three cartularii at work in the transcribing of books. In the twelfth century, Ordericus speaks of the monks who write books both as antiquarii and as librarii.[48] Richard de Bury uses the term in describing the renewal of old manuscripts, and restricts it to scribes who possessed scholarly and critical knowledge. Petrarch makes a similar application.[49] The term dictare was, during the Middle Ages, usually employed to describe the author’s work in composing, or in composing and writing with his own hand, and bears but seldom the meaning of “dictate.” The proper rendering would be more nearly our word “indite.”

The term used during the earlier Middle Ages to denote the Scriptures was not Biblia, but Bibliotheca. According to Maitland, the latter term has its origin with S. Jerome, who, in offering to lend books to his correspondent Florentius, writes: ... et quoniam largiente Domino, multis sacræ bibliothecæ codicibus abundamus, etc.[50] (And since by the grace of God, we possess a great many codices of the sacred writings.)

In nearly every instance in which reference is made to the complete collection of the Scriptures, the term used is Bibliotheca integra, or Bibliotheca tota. It was evidently the case that for centuries after the acceptance of the Canon, the several divisions or books of which the Bible consists were still frequently considered in the light of separate and independent works, and were transcribed and circulated separately.

S. Columba, the Apostle to Caledonia.

One of the earliest of the monks of the North of Europe whose life was associated with scholarship and intellectual influence, was S. Columba, the Apostle to Caledonia, whose life covered the term between the years 521 and 597. Columba belongs to the list of Irish saints, although the larger portion of his life’s work was done in Scotland. Before he had reached the age of twenty-five, he had presided over the foundation of no less than twenty-seven monasteries in Ireland, the oldest of which were Darrow and Derry; the latter, having long been the seat of a great Catholic bishopric, became, under its modern name of Londonderry, the bulwark of the Protestant contest against the efforts of the last of the Stuart kings.

The texts have been preserved of a number of songs ascribed to Columba, and, whether or not these verses were really the work of the monk, the tradition that he was the first of the Irish poets doubtless has foundation. In the time of Columba, the Irish monasteries already possessed texts in greater quantity than could be found in the monasteries of Scotland or England, but even in Ireland manuscripts were rare and costly, and were preserved with jealous care in the monastic libraries. Not only was very great value put upon these volumes, but they were even supposed to possess the emotions and the passions of living beings. Columba was himself a collector of manuscripts, and his biography by O’Donnell attributes to him the laborious feat of having transcribed with his own hand three hundred copies of the Psalter. According to one of the stories, Columba journeyed to Ossory in the south-west to visit a holy and very learned recluse, a doctor of laws and philosophy, named Longarad. Columba asked leave to examine the doctor’s books, and when the old man refused, the monk burst out in an imprecation: “May thy books no longer do thee any good, neither to them who come after thee, since thou takest occasion by them to show thine inhospitality.” The curse was heard, and after Longarad died, his books became unintelligible. An author of the ninth century says that the books still existed, but that no man could read them.[51]

Another story speaks of Columba’s undertaking, while visiting his ancient master Finnian, to make a clandestine and hurried copy of the abbot’s Psalter. He shut himself up at night in the church where the Psalter was deposited, and the light needed for his nocturnal work radiated from his left hand while he wrote with the right. A curious wanderer, passing the church, was attracted by the singular light, and looked in through the keyhole, and while his face was pressed against the door his eye was suddenly torn out by a crane which was roosting in the church. The wanderer went with his story to the abbot, and Finnian, indignant at what he considered to be a theft, claimed from Columba the copy which the monk had prepared, contending that a copy made without permission ought to belong to the owner of the original, on the ground that the transcript is the offspring of the original work. As far as I have been able to ascertain, this is the first instance which occurs in the history of European literature of a contention for copyright. Columba refused to give up his manuscript, and the question was referred to King Diarmid, or Dermott, in the palace at Tara. The King’s judgment was given in a rustic phrase which has passed into a proverb in Ireland: “To every cow her calf [le gach boin a boinin], and consequently to every book its copy.”[52]

Columba protested loudly, and threatened the King with vengeance. He retired to his own province chanting the song of trust, the text of which has been preserved and which is sacred as one of the most authentic relics of the ancient Irish tongue. He succeeded in arousing against the King the great and powerful clans of his relatives and friends, and after a fierce struggle the King was overcome and was obliged to take refuge at Tara.

The manuscript which had been the object of this strange conflict of copyright, a conflict which developed into a civil war, was afterwards venerated as a kind of national military and religious palladium. Under the name of Cathac, or “the fighter,” the Latin Psalter said to have been transcribed by Columba was enshrined in the base of a portable altar as the national relic of the O’Donnell clan. It was preserved for 1300 years in the O’Donnell family, and as late as 1867, belonged to a baronet of that name, who placed it on exhibition in the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy. O’Curry prints a fac-simile of a fragment of the manuscript, which he believes to be in the hand-writing of S. Columba, and O’Curry and Reeves are in accord in the opinion that the famous copy of the Gospels known as the “Book of Kells” is also the work of the poet monk.[53]