Books and their makers during the Middle Ages

by George Haven Putnam

In Padua, as in Bologna, there were fixed commissions for the sale of manuscripts, and these commissions, in themselves quite moderate, were to be paid half by the buyer and half by the seller. It appears, however, that the prices were probably not fully controlled by these regulations, as there are examples of so-called “presents” being given by buyers to the sellers after the sale of manuscripts on the commission basis specified in the regulations had been duly recorded.

In Padua, as in Bologna, it was strictly forbidden for Jews to take any part in the buying and selling of manuscripts. The only way in which a Jew could secure a manuscript desired by him was through the intervention of the university authorities, who might make purchase of the same on his behalf. The bidellus was the official usually employed for the purpose. It may be assumed that some additional commission was here required, and that the Jews had to pay more dearly for their university texts than the Christians.

There does not appear to be record of the loaning of manuscripts to students for their own transcribing, although in Paris this evidently formed an important portion of the manuscript business. In Bologna, as in Padua, the trade in bookbinding was directly associated with that of manuscript selling, and the ligatori librorum carried on their work in the shops of the librarii. In Bologna, the manuscripts were in the main devoted to the subjects of the law and scholastic theology, while in Padua the more important division was medicine.

The literary requirements, however, for doctors of law as for doctors of medicine, must have been at best but moderate. Savigny states that in the thirteenth century the collection of books belonging to a doctor of the law in Bologna rarely comprised more than from four to six volumes, and the medical collections were hardly as large. It is with the beginning of the fifteenth century that there comes to be a larger understanding of the relations of literature to education and a material increase in the demand in the university towns for supplies of books outside of the texts actually in use in the lecture room.

Compayré gives the following list of the books required in the ordinary and in the extraordinary courses of law in Bologna, a list which was, he says, practically the same at Montpellier: The several works of the Corpus Juris of Justinian, comprising the Codex (which dates from 529), the Digestum Vetus, the Infortiatum, the Digestum Novum. These were identical with the three parts which the pupils of Irnerius distinguished as the Pandects or Digest, the Institutes, the Authenticum. To these sources of the Roman law were later added the Constitutiones of Frederick I. and Frederick II., and in Montpellier the Usus Feudorum, a collection of feudal laws.

The statutes of the universities fixed the time within which the reading of the prescribed books must be completed. Professors were obliged, in entering upon their duties, to take the following oath: “I swear to read and to finish reading within the time fixed by the statutes, the books or parts of books which have been assigned for my lectures.” Severe penalties were inflicted on those whose courses had not been completed within the required time.[267] There ought, as a rule, to have been no difficulty in completing the task assigned, for each Faculty had, as a rule, only a single work or at most a single author assigned for its consideration. The Faculty of Arts had Aristotle, that of Civil Law the Corpus Juris of Justinian, that of Common Law the Decretals of Gratian. Compayré suggests that, according to the maxim of Seneca, timeo hominem unius libri, the Faculties of the Middle Ages might well have been awe-inspiring.

The list of the texts of the medical Faculties was, however, somewhat more considerable. The course in Montpellier, where medicine became still more important than law, followed in the main that of Salerno. The first place was given to Hippocrates and Galen. It is somewhat surprising that as late as 1250 the teachings of these old-time practitioners (whose work was done respectively in the fourth century B.C. and the second century A.D.) should still have remained the chief authorities in medical science. Compayré refers to them as the Aristotles of Medicine. In the program of the Faculty of Paris of 1270, however, the names of Hippocrates and Galen do not appear.

With the two Greeks were associated the original works of Constantine and his translations from Rhazes Hali-Abbas, Ysaac, Avicenna, Johannicus, and other Arabic and Persian writers, and finally the treatise of John of St. Amand, and of Nicholas of Salerno. The Antidotarium, or Book of Antidotes, known also as the Book of Medicaments, was for some centuries a work of standard reference and of popular sale. The influence of the Arabs in the instructional literature of medicine seems to have been almost as controlling as that of the Greeks in philosophy and of the Romans in law.

Rabelais, who studied medicine in Montpellier between 1520 and 1530, is said to have been the first among the students who was able to read his Greek authors in the original instead of in Latin translations.[268] Rabelais found time while in college not only for Greek and medicine, but for literature. The first part of the Pantagruel was written before he had secured his final diploma.

By the middle of the thirteenth century, the number of the books required for use in the university courses had increased to such an extent that four catalogues were issued, one for each of the four Faculties—Law, Medicine, Theology, and Arts. The lectures and the instruction were given entirely in Latin, which was the only language that could have been understood by all of the various nationalities represented, or even by the representatives of the different Italian dialects.