Books and their makers during the Middle Ages

by George Haven Putnam

In the two schools attached to St. Gall, lectures were given, in the latter half of the tenth century, on Cicero, Quintilian, Horace, Terence, Juvenal, Persius, Ovid, and Sophocles.[177] There was even said to be among the monks of St. Gall a society established for the study of Greek, called the Hellenic Brothers.[178] The Duchess Hedwig of Suabia herself taught Greek to Abbot Burckhart II. when he was a child, and rewarded him by the gift of a “Horace” for his readiness in verse-making. The Abbot later described in verse the embarrassment caused to him by a kiss with which the learned Duchess had favoured him.[179] The Duchess had, when a young woman, learned Latin from the Ekkehart who, later, became Dean of St. Gall (Ekkehart I.), in partnership with whom she wrote a commentary on Virgil. A very charming account of the tuition of this fascinating young Duchess is given in Scheffel’s famous romance called Der Treue Ekkehart. Arx states that Ekkehart III. and IV. and Notker Labeo were familiar with Homer, Plato, and Aristotle, and made from them Greek verses.[180]

There is every evidence to indicate that there was during the tenth century a knowledge of Greek in certain monastery centres of South Europe, which knowledge, two centuries later, had disappeared almost entirely, so that the re-introduction into Italy of the writings of Greek poets and philosophers in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries came as a fresh revelation. Mabillon contended that while the monks made Holy Scripture the basis for their theological studies, it is certain that they acquired apart from these studies, a mass of other knowledge, and notably all that they could gather with regard to physical science. Thence it arose that in mediæval works the term scripturæ, or even scripturæ sacræ, does not always mean the Holy Scriptures, but stands for all books which treat of Christian or ecclesiastical truths or which are useful aids in understanding the Word of God.[181] Montalembert, commenting on this passage, goes on to say that to the monk of the tenth century no knowledge was unfamiliar. Philosophy in its scholastic form, grammar and versification, music, botany, mechanics, astronomy, geometry in its most practical application, all of these were the objects of their research and of their writings. The curious poem addressed by the monk Alfano to Theodoric, son of the Count Marses and at the time a novice at Monte Cassino, is cited in support of this view. The poem presents a detailed account of the daily occupations in the great monastery, in which occupations literary work holds a very large place. It also gives a summary of the scholastic pursuits carried on in the monastery.[182]

A service possibly even greater than that of the preservation of literature and of the keeping alive of an intellectual spirit, was rendered by the monks in the great educational work carried on by them. In the Monasterium Resbacense, in Brieggan, founded by Bishop Andœnus in 634, whose first abbot, S. Ægilius, was a pupil of S. Columban’s, the list of books in the scriptorium included Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Terence, Donatus, Priscian, and Boëthius. Of later authors, the works of Beda, Isidore, Aldhelm, the Gesta Francorum, etc.[183] By the time of Charles Martel and the battle of Poitiers, there had been much plundering and devastation of the monasteries and convents, the effects of which remained even after the Arabs were driven back. During the tumultuous reigns of the Pepins, many clerics returned to or took up the profession of arms, and devotion and literature were alike neglected.[184] The biographer of S. Eligius, writing in 760 (under Pepin) says:[185]

“What do we want with the so-called philosophies of Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, or with the rubbish and nonsense of such shameless poets as Homer, Virgil, and Menander? What service can be rendered to the servants of God by the writings of the heathen Sallust, Herodotus, Livy, Demosthenes, or Cicero?” Fredegar, called Scholasticus, wrote his chronicle in a Burgundian monastery, about 600. He complains that “the world is in its decrepitude. Intellectual activity is dead, and the ancient writers have no successors.”

The man to whom the revival of the literary interests of the northern monasteries was largely due was the Archbishop Chrodegang of Metz, 742-766, Chancellor of Charles Martel, a Benedictine. He framed rules for the monasteries which restored discipline and infused new life. His code was adopted throughout France, Italy, and Germany, and even in England. A certain uniformity of instruction was thus secured in the monastery schools in singing, language, and script, which persisted almost until the time of Alcuin, and the influence of which extended even beyond the monasteries.

Mabillon tells a story of Odo, Abbot of Clugni (who died about 942), who was so seduced by the love of knowledge that he was led to employ himself with the vanities of the poets, and resolved to read the works of Virgil regularly through. On the following night, however, he saw in a dream a large vase of marvellous beauty, but filled with innumerable serpents, which, springing forth, twined about him, but without doing him any injury. The holy man, waking and prudently considering the vision, took the serpents to stand for the figments of the poets, and the vase to represent Virgil’s book, which was painted outwardly with worldly eloquence, but was internally defiled with the vanity of impure meaning. From thenceforward, renouncing Virgil and his pomps, and keeping the poets out of his chamber, he sought his mental nourishment solely from the sacred writings.[186]

Honorius, the reputed author of the Gemma Animæ, writes in 1120: “It grieves me when I consider in my mind the number of persons who, having lost their senses, are not ashamed to give their utmost labour to the investigation of the abominable figments of the poets, and the captious arguments of the philosophers, which are wont inextricably to bind the mind that is drawn away from God in the bonds of vices and to be ignorant of the Christian profession whereby the soul may come to reign everlastingly with God; as it is the height of madness to be anxious to learn the laws of an usurper and to be ignorant of the edicts of the lawful sovereign. Moreover, how is the soul profited by the strife of Hector, or the argumentation of Plato, or the poems of Virgil, or the elegies of Ovid, who now, with their like, are gnashing their teeth in the prison of the infernal Babylon, under the cruel tyranny of Pluto.”[187]

Peter the Venerable, who was Abbot of Clugni in the middle of the twelfth century, is referred to by the historian Milner as a flagrant example of the ignorance of the monastic authorities of his time. Maitland finds cause for no little indignation with the hasty and ill-founded statements of Milner, and devotes several chapters to an account of the monastery of Clugni under the rule of Peter, presenting very ample evidence of the literary activity and scholarly interests of the abbot and of his close relations with the intellectual leaders of his time, leaders who were, with hardly an exception, monks and ecclesiastics. “Who will venture to say,” writes Maitland, “that Peter would have been pilloried as an ignorant and trifling writer if Milner had happened to have any personal knowledge of his history and his works and if he had read in one of the long series of Peter’s Epistles the words, Libri et maxime Augustiniani, ut nosti, apud nos auro preciosiores sunt.”[188] (Books, and especially those of S. Augustine, are esteemed by us as more precious than gold.)

The literary journeys of Mabillon were followed by similar journeys on the part of Father Montfaucon and Edouard Martene, who were both, like Mabillon, members of the learned Benedictines of St. Maur. Mabillon’s journeys covered the period of the long wars following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (in 1685), including the campaigns between France and England in the Low Countries. It was probably due to these campaigns that his researches did not include any of the monasteries of the lower Rhine, of Flanders, or of Brabant. Martene’s journeys continued during a term of six years, in which time he examined manuscripts in more than one hundred cathedrals and at least eight hundred abbeys. The materials collected were utilised first in the new edition of the Gallia Christiana, and later, in five folio volumes, comprising only matter previously unpublished, issued under the title Thesaurus Novum Anecdotorum. The account of the journey was printed under the title Voyage Littéraire de Deux Religieux Benedictins.

In 1718, Martene and Montfaucon were again sent on their literary travels, and the later collections were issued in 1724 in nine folio volumes, under the title Veterum Scriptorum et Monumentorum Historicorum, Dogmaticorum, Moralium, Amplissima Collectio. I specify these works of the literary Benedictines because, although by their date they do not properly belong to my narrative, they form a very important authority for what is known of the literary history of the monasteries. In some of the monasteries which had in earlier times been famous as centres of literary activity, the libraries were found by Mabillon and Martene in a grievous condition of destitution and dilapidation. At Clugni, for instance, they describe the catalogue (itself six hundred years old), written on parchment-covered boards three feet and a half long and eighteen inches wide (grandes tablettes qu’on ferme comme un livre), containing some thousands of titles, but of the books there remained scarcely one hundred. Martene was told that the Huguenots had carried them off to Geneva. At Novantula, of all its former riches Mabillon found but two manuscripts; and at Beaupré, of the great collection of manuscripts there remained but two or three; while many other famous libraries were in similar condition. The destruction of so large a portion of the collection of manuscripts and of the earlier printed books was due to a variety of causes. During the ninth century, the ravages of the Danes and Normans brought desolation upon a long list of the monasteries throughout Europe which could most easily be reached from the coast. In the index to the third volume of Mabillon’s annals, is given a long list of the Benedictine monasteries pillaged or destroyed by the Normans. The record begins Normanni, monasteria et eis incensa, eversa, direpta. In many of these visitations the loss of books must have been considerable. When, for instance, the abbey of Peterborough in Northamptonshire was burned by the Danes in the year 870, Ingulph records the destruction of a large collection of books, sanctorum librorum ingens bibliotheca.[189] Maitland points out that this expression probably stood for really a great library, as when Ingulph speaks of the destruction in 1091 of the collection of 700 volumes belonging to his own monastery, he does not so describe it.[190]