The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts

by M. R. James

Perhaps a word about these ancient Virgils will not be unwelcome. They are cited in all the textbooks, it is true, but I think they are apt to be confused; at any rate it is easy to confuse them.

They are five in number: three very fragmentary, two more or less complete. The surnames they go by are Sangallensis, Augusteus, Vaticanus, Romanus, Mediceus.

Sangallensis and Augusteus are practically the only pieces of books we have which are written in the old square capitals, like those of the Roman inscriptions. Sangallensis consists of a few leaves which were found by Von Arx, a librarian of St. Gall, in the bindings of books in that abbey's library. Of Augusteus there are four leaves at Rome (Vaticanus latinus 3,256) and three at Berlin; and somewhere, perhaps in a private library in France, is or was another bit which was known to scholars in the seventeenth century. This copy was once at the Royal Abbey of St. Denis. Both of these are fourth-century books at latest.

Vaticanus (lat. 3,225) is a more complete copy, illustrated with fifty paintings in good classical style, and is also assigned to the fourth century.

Romanus (Vat. lat. 3,867), once at St. Denis, is a pictured copy too, but not nearly so good in style.

Mediceus, written before a.d. 494, is at Florence (a single leaf of it is bound up with Vaticanus). It was formerly in the abbey library of Bobbio.

These three books are written in "rustic capitals."

A larger, but still small, group of books of "classical" date are the palimpsests, the most famous of which are at Milan and Rome. There was a time, early in the nineteenth century, when Angelo Mai, afterwards Cardinal, and Prefect of the Vatican Library, was constantly launching fresh surprises upon scholars, the results of his work in what was then an almost untouched field. Large fragments of Cicero's Republic, of lost orations of Cicero, of the works of the rhetorician Fronto, were issued at short intervals: and all the most important of these were recovered from palimpsests in the Ambrosian or the Vatican Library. They had all come, too, from one place, the same Bobbio which has been already named. Bobbio was founded by the Irishman St. Columban (d. 615). The list of the early and valuable MSS. which can be traced to it would take up a large share of my available space; but among the precious things it owned was a number of quite ancient volumes, the Cicero and Fronto and others—books sumptuously written in uncial letters in the fourth century, which, sad to say, the Bobbio monks themselves broke up, washed out the earlier writing, and covered the pages with texts more immediately useful to them. Whence did they come? An answer to that question has been offered recently which finds favour among experts. They are the relics, it is said, of the library formed by Cassiodorus at his monastery of Vivarium or Squillace, in South Italy. Cassiodorus is a great figure in the history of his own time, and in his influence upon the general course of learning. He was private secretary to Theodoric King of the Goths; in his old age he retired from public to monastic life, and his last years were devoted to equipping the monks he had gathered about him for study—first and foremost the study of the Scriptures, but also, as leading up to that, the study of languages, of history and geography, and, as conducing to the general welfare, of medicine, botany, and other useful arts. It had been a cherished project of his to found an academy at Rome where all such learning might be fostered, but that plan failed, and Cassiodorus took into his retreat at Vivarium all the store of books he had accumulated, and wrote a little manual to guide his monks to the right use of them. His Institutes (as the book is called) do not give a set catalogue of his library, but there are many and striking coincidences between the manual and the literary works which can be traced to Bobbio. A specimen may be given: he recommends a writer on gardening called Gargilius Martialis. Hardly anyone else mentions this person, and his work had disappeared until Mai found pieces of it in a palimpsest at Naples which had come from Bobbio. We owe much to Cassiodorus in any case, for it was he who commended secular learning to monks, and the fact that monks were the great preservers of ancient literature cannot be dissociated from his influence. I shall be glad if the theory I have stated (it is that of the late Dr. Rudolf Beer) proves sound; to have some of the very volumes which Cassiodorus handled would be worth much.

There is a link between the library of Cassiodorus and our own country. A famous Latin Bible now at Florence, the Codex Amiatinus, is known to have been once in England, at Wearmouth or Jarrow, and to have been taken abroad by Ceolfrid, Abbot of those monasteries, in 716 as a present to the Pope, whom it never reached, for Ceolfrid died at Langres on his way to Rome. The story has often been told, and needs not to be dwelt upon here; but a view has been broached, and is stoutly maintained by Sir Henry Howorth, which does deserve mention and is not yet familiar. It is that the first quire in the Amiatine Bible, which contains pictures and lists of Biblical books, is actually a portion of a Bible written for Cassiodorus. There is much to be said for this, and at the least we may be sure that it is a direct copy from such a Bible. Sir Henry would go farther, and claim the whole book as Cassiodorian. I do not know that expert opinion is prepared to endorse this.

The mention of Cassiodorus has led us below the date of the "classical" period, for he died in 583. For one moment I revert to the earlier time to record an interesting example of wandering. Illustrated books of the early centuries are the greatest of rarities. The two Virgils, the Vienna and the Cotton Genesis, the Homer at Milan, the Gospels of Rossano in Calabria and those of Sinope now at Paris, the Dioscorides at Vienna, the Pentateuch of Tours, the Joshua-roll at the Vatican—these are the most famous, and there are very few beside them. Among those few are some pieces of a Latin Bible written in the fourth century, and containing parts of Samuel and Kings, with paintings which, when fresh, must have been of high excellence. They have unhappily suffered grievous damage, for they were used in the seventeenth century to make covers for municipal documents at the royal and ancient abbatial town of Quedlinburg (the scene of Canning's Rovers). The painted leaves are now at Berlin; a leaf of plain text remains at Quedlinburg. No one doubts that the book to which they belonged was made in Italy, and the likeliest history that can be imagined for it is that it was brought as a gift to the abbey by a German prince, say in the tenth century. It is hard to explain the neglect and mutilation of so noble a book, in whose contents there was nothing to offend Protestant or other religious susceptibilities. Only we find, by numerous examples, that the MSS. we should most prize now, those written in capitals or uncials with the words undivided, or in Irish or English scripts which became unfamiliar, were uniformly despised and neglected by the readers of later centuries. We meet with notes of this kind in monastic catalogues: "It cannot be read," "Old and useless," and the like. Still, one would have thought that the pictures of the Quedlinburg book would have saved it, even in a German nunnery.