Books and their makers during the Middle Ages

by George Haven Putnam

CHAPTER III.

THE MAKING OF BOOKS IN THE EARLY UNIVERSITIES.

THE first revival of the long slumbering trade in manuscripts took place in Italy, the cradle of the universities. Although after the breaking down of the old civilisation of the Western Empire, Italy had suffered more through invasions and devastations than any other country of Europe, it had nevertheless succeeded in preserving a certain continuity of cultivation and some remnants of learning or germs of intellectual life, from which germs there came again into growth an intellectual development for Europe. For the purposes of this study, I am concerned with the history of the early universities of Europe only in connection with their relations to the production of books. I propose, therefore, to give a brief description of the organisation and the character of the book-trade that came into existence in one or two of the representative university towns, with some reference to the general influence of the first universities upon the development and the distribution of literature.

As has been indicated in the introductory chapter, it is my understanding that, with the beginning of the thirteenth century, the responsibility for the preservation and the development of the intellectual life of Europe, for the mental training of the increasing proportion of the community which was conscious of intellectual existence, and for the transmission to the existing generations of what had been preserved of the thought and learning of the past, was transferred from the monasteries and the ecclesiastical schools to the newly organised universities.

This change meant among other things that the control and direction of education no longer rested with the ecclesiastics, that the class of scholars was no longer limited to the clerics, and that there were other directions in which scholarly achievement was to be sought than those heretofore marked out by the Church. I do not mean to say that after the beginning of the thirteenth century, when the schools of Bologna and Paris had developed into universities, the Church consciously abandoned the control of education, a control which had rested in its hands for eight centuries. The representatives of the Church authority themselves took an important part in bringing into existence not a few of the universities, and in connection with the organisation of the theological Faculties and in other ways, the popes and the bishops retained for a long series of years an important and abiding influence over much of the university work. Heretical doctrines, or what Rome believed to be heretical doctrines, were taught not infrequently in university lecture-rooms, but the authority on the part of the Church to interfere with such teaching, and to secure the withdrawal of the license from the lecturer, was continually claimed and was frequently enforced. The fact remained, however, that the general direction and control of the work of higher education rested no longer with ecclesiastics but with laymen. Of the four great divisions of university instruction, Theology, Philosophy (or Art), Law, and Medicine, the first remained of necessity under the direction of the Church, while in the supervision of the second the Church undertook to exercise an influence which of necessity varied greatly from time to time according to the institution and according also to the character of the particular popes and bishops. The third and fourth Faculties were, however, entirely independent of ecclesiastical influence, and the mere fact of the existence outside of the Church of an important division of learning and of a great body of scholars must have had a powerful effect on the imagination of communities which had for so many generations been accustomed to look to the Church as the source or as the interpreter of all knowledge.

The principal authorities on the rise and the general history of the earlier universities are Denifle, Laurie, Mullinger, and Compayré. The titles of their several works, on which have in the main been based such statements or conclusions as are expressed in the following pages, are given in full in the bibliography. The details concerning the work of the university scribes and the manuscript dealers are chiefly derived from the works of Wattenbach and Kirchhoff.[258]

It is to be noted that several centuries before the institution in Christian Europe of the first of the universities, and at a time when, outside of a few monastic scriptoria, the interest in literature in Christian states was almost non-existent, in the countries which had accepted the faith of Mahomet a system of higher education had been effectively organised, and in connection with the intellectual activity of the universities and libraries of Bagdad, Alexandria, Cairo, and Cordova, there had been a very considerable production of literature in the departments of jurisprudence, philosophy, and science. In fact, the first knowledge that came to the Europe of the Middle Ages concerning Greek thought and Greek literature was brought to it through Arabian scholars, and it was by means of the lecturers of Cordova that the doctrines of Aristotle were made known to the philosophers of Paris. The list of the scholarly writers who were associated during the eleventh and twelfth centuries with the great Arabian schools is a long one, and the books produced by them included not a few works which had an abiding influence on the thought of Europe. I have, however, no information concerning the methods employed for the manifolding and distribution of the books, and a consideration of them does not properly find place in this study. The names of Avicenna (d. 1027) and Averrhoes (d. 1198) will be recognised as representative of the class of authors referred to, the men who, by their translations of Hippocrates, Galen, Aristotle, and other Greek classics, recalled what Laurie calls the university life of the Greeks.[259]

In explaining how the universities are to be distinguished from the cathedral schools or the Benedictine schools out of which they were developed, Laurie gives the following definition of the first universities: “They were specialised schools, as opposed to the schools of Arts, and they were open to all, without restriction, as studia publica or generalia, as opposed to the more restricted ecclesiastical schools, which were under a Rule.”[260]