This passage, which is frequently quoted, surely refers to his eminence in dialectics. The words of William of Malmsbury go farther. “Is literatura perinsignis liberales artes quæ jamdudum sorduerant, a Latio in Gallias vocans acumine suo expolivit.”
[149] Hist. Litt. de la France, vii. 17, 107; viii. 304. The seventh volume of this long and laborious work begins with an excellent account of the literary condition of France in the eleventh century. At the beginning of the ninth volume we have a similar view of the twelfth. The continuation, of which four volumes have already been published at Paris, I have not seen. It has but begun to break ground, if I may so say, in the thirteenth century, as I find from the Journal des Savans. The laboriousness of the French, as well as the encouragement they receive from their government, are above all praise, and should be our own shame; but their prolixity now and then defeats the object. The magnificent work, the Ordonnances des Rois de France, is a proof of this; time gains a march on the successive volumes, and the laws of four years are published at the end of five.
Italy—Vocabulary of Papias. 80. The signs of gradual improvement in Italy during the eleventh century are very perceptible; several schools, among which those of Milan and the convent of Monte Cassino are most eminent, were established; and some writers such as Peter Damiani and Humbert, have obtained praise for rather more elegance and polish of style than had belonged to their predecessors.[150] The Latin vocabulary of Papias was finished in 1053. This is a compilation from the grammars and glossaries of the sixth and seventh centuries; but though many of his words are of very low Latinity, and his etymologies, which are those of his masters, absurd, he both shows a competent degree of learning, and a regard to profane literature, unusual in the darker ages, and symptomatic of a more liberal taste.[151]
[150] Bettinelli, Risorgimento d’Italia dopo il mille. Tiraboschi, iii. 248.
[151] The date of the vocabulary of Papias had been placed by Scaliger, who says he has as many errors as words, in the thirteenth century. But Gaspar Barthius, in his Adversaria, c. i., after calling him, “veterum Glossographorum compactor non semper futilis,” observes, that Papias mentions an Emperor, Henry II., as then living, and thence fixes the æra of his book in the early part of the eleventh century, in which he is followed by Bayle, art. Balbi. It is rather singular that neither of those writers recollected the usage of the Italians to reckon as Henry II. the prince whom the Germans call Henry III., Henry the Fowler not being included by them in the imperial list: and Bayle himself quotes a writer, unpublished in the age of Barthius, who places Papias in the year 1053. This date I believe is given by Papias himself. Tiraboschi, iii. 300. A pretty full account of the Latin glossaries before and after Papias will be found in the preface to Ducange, p. 38.
Influence of Italy upon Europe. 81. It may be said with some truth, that Italy supplied the fire, from which other nations in this first, as afterwards in the second æra of the revival of letters, lighted their own torches. Lanfranc, Anselm, Peter Lombard, the founder of systematic theology in the twelfth century, Irnerius, the restorer of jurisprudence, Gratian, the author of the first compilation of canon law, the school of Salerno, that guided medical art in all countries, the first dictionaries of the Latin tongue, the first treatise of algebra, the first great work that makes an epoch in anatomy, are as truly and exclusively the boast of Italy, as the restoration of Greek literature and of classical taste in the fifteenth century.[152] But if she were the first to propagate an impulse towards intellectual excellence in the rest of Europe, it must be owned, that France and England, in this dawn of literature and science, went in many points of view far beyond her.
[152] Bettinelli, Risorgimento d’Italia, p. 71.
Increased copying of manuscripts. 82. Three religious orders, all scions from the great Benedictine stock, that of Clugni, which dates from the first part of the tenth century, the Carthusians, founded in 1084, and the Cistercians, in 1098, contributed to propagate classical learning.[153] The monks of these foundations exercised themselves in copying manuscripts; the arts of calligraphy, and, not long afterwards, of illumination, became their pride; a more cursive handwriting and a more convenient system of abbreviations were introduced; and thus from the twelfth century we find a great increase of manuscripts, though transcribed mechanically, as a monastic duty, and often with much incorrectness. The abbey of Clugni had a rich library of Greek and Latin authors. But few monasteries of the Benedictine rule were destitute of one; it was their pride to collect, and their business to transcribe, books.[154] These were, in a vast proportion, such as we do not highly value at the present day; yet almost all we do possess of Latin classical literature, with the exception of a small number of more ancient manuscripts, is owing to the industry of these monks. In that age, there was perhaps less zeal for literature in Italy, and less practice in copying, than in France.[155] This shifting of intellectual exertion from one country to another is not peculiar to the middle ages; but, in regard to them, it has not always been heeded by those who, using the trivial metaphor of light and darkness, which it is not easy to avoid, have too much considered Europe as a single point under a receding or advancing illumination.
[153] Fleury. Hist. Litt. de la France, ix. 113.