Books and their makers during the Middle Ages

by George Haven Putnam

Muratori speaks of books when presented to churches being offered at the altar, pro remedio animæ suæ,[203] and on this quotation Robertson bases a further argument concerning the high value of books. It was, however, the ordinary routine that when a person made a present of anything to a church, it was offered at the altar, and it was understood, if not always specifically expressed, that such offering was made either for his own spiritual benefit or for that of some other person. It was doubtless the case that gifts of books to a church were rare as compared with the gifts of other things, for the simple reason that nearly all the books that came into existence were produced in the churches or in the attendant monasteries.

Delisle says that the loan of books from monastery libraries was considered one of the most meritorious of all acts of mercy. Against this view there are many examples of the formal prohibition of the lending of any books outside of the walls of the monastery. Some communities placed the books of their libraries under an anathema,—that is to say, they forbade under pain of excommunication either borrowing or lending. This selfish policy was, however, formally condemned in 1212 by the Council of Paris, the Fathers of which urged more charitable sentiments on these bibliophiles: “We forbid monks to bind themselves by any oath not to lend books to the poor, seeing that such a loan is one of the chief works of mercy. We desire that the books of a community should be divided into two classes, one to remain in the house for the use of the Brothers, the other to be lent out to the poor according to the judgment of the abbot.”[204]

In support of his contention concerning the general disappearance of literature during the Middle Ages, Robertson quotes the authority of Muratori to the effect that, “even monasteries of considerable note had only one missal.”[205] Maitland has no difficulty in showing that the passage cited has been wrongly understood, and that the generalisation based upon it is absurd. Muratori was referring to a letter of a certain Bonus, who was for thirty years (1018-1048) Abbot of the monastery of S. Michael, in Pisa. In this letter, Bonus gives an account of the founding of the monastery, and says that when he came to Pisa he found there, not a monastery, but simply a chapel, which was in a most deplorable and destitute condition, wanting vessels, vestments, bells, and nearly all the requisites for the performance of divine service, and having no service-books but a missal (nisi unum missale). The statement so worded is of course no evidence that there may not have been several copies of the missal. It simply shows that there were no other books (such as texts of the Epistles or Gospels) for use in the service. Bonus goes on to say, with commendable pride, that in fifteen years’ time “the little hut,” as he calls it, had expanded into a monastery, with suitable offices and with a considerable estate in land, the single tin cup had been exchanged for gold and silver chalices, and in place of one “missal,” the monks rejoiced in the possession of a library of thirty-four volumes. It is difficult to understand how Robertson could have justified himself in basing, on a careless version of a statement concerning a missal in a single half-ruined chapel, a broad and misleading generalisation concerning the general absence of books from monasteries. The list of the library later secured by the abbot includes copies of the Gospels, the Psalms, and the Epistles, the Rule of S. Benedict, the Book of Job, the Book of Ezekiel, five Diurnals, eight Antiphonarii, three Nocturnals, a tractate by S. Augustine on Genesis, a book of Dialogues, a Glossary, a Pastoral, a book of Canons, a book entitled Summum Bonum, five Missals, a book entitled Passionarum unum novum ubi sunt omnes passiones ecclesiasticæ (I give the wording from the catalogue), and the Liber Bibliotheca. “Bibliotheca” is the term very generally applied at this period to the Bible, and often used for a collection comprising but a few books of the Bible. The catalogue shows that the good Abbot had made a very fair beginning towards a monastic library.

The letters of Gerbert, Abbot of Bobbio (who, in 998, became Pope under the name of Sylvester II.), throw some light upon the literary interests of that famous monastery and of the time. He writes (about 984) to a monk named Rainald (letter 130 of the collection): “You know with what zeal I seek for copies of books from all quarters, and you know how many scribes there are everywhere in Italy, both in the cities and in the rural districts, I entreat you then ... that you will have transcripts made for me of M. Manilius’ De Astrologia, Victorinus’ De Rhetorica, and of the Ophthalmicus of Demosthenes.... Whatever you lay out I will repay you to the full, according to your accounts.” In letter 123, Gerbert writes to Thietmar of Mayence for a portion of one of the works of Boëthius, his copy being defective. In letter 9, written to Abbot Giselbert, he asks for assistance in making good certain deficiencies in his manuscript of the oration of Cicero, Pro Rege Deiotaro. In letter 8, to the Archbishop of Rheims, he requests that prelate to borrow for him from Abbot Azo a copy of Cæsar’s Commentaries. In return he offers the loan of eight volumes of Boëthius. In letter 7, he requests his friend Airard to attend to the correction of the manuscript of Pliny, and to preparing transcripts of two other manuscripts. In letter 44, to Egbert, Abbot of Tours, he states that he has been much occupied in collecting a library, and that he had for a long time been paying transcribers in Rome, in other parts of Italy, in Germany, and in Belgium, and in buying at great expense texts of important authors. He asks the Abbot to aid in doing similar work in France, and he gives a list (unfortunately lost) of the works for transcripts of which he is looking. He is ready to supply the parchment and to defray all the expenses of the work. In other letters he makes reference to his own writings on rhetoric, arithmetic, and spherical geometry.

These letters, for the reference to which I am indebted to Maitland,[206] assuredly give the impression that even in the dark period of the tenth century, there was no little activity in certain ecclesiastical circles and monastic centres in the transcribing, collecting, and exchanging of books, and not merely of missals, breviaries, or monkish legends, but of literature recognised as classic.

Another letter, written a century and a half later, makes reference to the practice of exchanging books or of using them as pledges. A prior writes to an abbot in 1150: “To his Lord, the Venerable Abbot of—— wishes health and happiness. Although you desire to have the books of Tully, I know that you are a Christian and not a Ciceronian. But you go over to the camp of the enemy not as a deserter, but as a spy. I should, therefore, have sent you the books of Tully which we have, De Re Agraria, the Philippics, and the Epistles, but that it is not our custom that any books should be lent to any person without good pledges. Send us, therefore, the Noctes Atticæ of Aulus Gellius and Origen on the Canticles. The books which we have just brought from France, if you wish for any of them, I will send you.” The Abbot replies at the end of a long letter: “I have sent you as pledges for your books, Origen on the Canticles, and instead of Aulus Gellius (which I could not have at this time), a book which is called Strategematon, which is military.”[207]

The custom of securing books by chains, which prevailed with the libraries of all the earlier religious institutions, did not originate with these. Eusebius mentions that the Roman Senate in the time of Claudius ordered the treatise of Philo Judæus on the Impiety of Caligula to be chained in the library as a famous monument. There appears to have been an early appreciation on the part of certain of the monastery scholars of the importance of indexes. Fosbroke quotes among others the example of John Brome, Prior of Gorlestone, who, in the fifteenth century, put indexes to almost all the books in his library. From an examination of the catalogues of various of the ecclesiastical libraries, Fosbroke arrives at the calculation that the proportion of the works contained under the several main sub-headings was approximately as follows: Divinity, 175; scholastic literature, 89; epistles and controversial literature, 65; history, 54; biography, 32; arts, mathematics, and astrology, 31; philosophy, 13; law, 6.[208] This classification does not give any separate heading for allegory, although this was a subject in which not a few of the earlier monkish writers largely interested themselves.

As an example of monkish allegorical literature, Fosbroke mentions a work written in 1435, under the instructions of a cloth shearer in France, whose name he does not give. The cloth cutter, being a great lover of tennis, had written a ballad upon that game. When he was old, he wished to atone for his early sins and frivolities, and he secured the services of a Dominican monk, who wrote, at his instance and expense, an allegory on the game of tennis. The wall of the tennis court stood for faith, which should always rest on a solid foundation, while in the other conditions of the game the Dominican finds the cardinal virtues, the evangelists, active and contemplative life, the old and the new law, etc.

In the thirteenth century, Omons, who might be described as the Lucretius of his day, wrote a work entitled The Picture of the World, from which one could gather an impression of the character of the philosophy of the early Middle Ages. In the department of metaphysics, Omons (using largely material borrowed from Thales, Anaxagoras, Epicurus, and Plato) described God as comparatively an idle being, and speaks of Him as having at the time of creating Matter also created Nature. Nature executed the will of God as an axe executes the will of the carpenter; it sometimes, however, through want or excess of matter, produces deformities.

The Liberal Arts, Omons divides under the usual septenary arrangement, which is adopted as early as the fifth century by Capella. Omons makes mathematics, however, not a mere science of numbers, but the knowledge of everything that is produced in any regular order whatever, while rhetoric includes judicial verdicts, decretals, laws, etc. The term “liberal” he applied only to an art which explicitly appertained to the mind; and therefore, medicine, painting, sculpture, navigation, the military art, architecture, etc., although in their theories as intellectual as are mathematics and astronomy, were, because applicable to bodily purposes, denominated trades. The term “philosopher” means only men versed in the occult sciences of nature, and among the later philosophers Omons held no one so eminent as Virgil. This was not the Bard of Mantua, but an ugly little Italian conjurer, who, during the tenth century, had performed various feats of legerdemain.